Three tips for organizing your church's media files, plus a couple of bonus ones at the end.
None of this depends on where your files live. Dropbox, Google Drive, a NAS, a stack of hard drives in a drawer. The structure is the same. Where to keep them is a separate question.
Year at the top level. Event type underneath.
We didn't do this at first, and our 2015 to 2018 folders are a mess I've never gone back and fixed. Once we started, it changed everything.
Our 2023 folder breaks into bumper videos, Christmas, Easter, events, ministries, miscellaneous b-roll, nights of worship, sermons, life groups, and Sunday service photos and videos.
When somebody asks for footage from last Easter, you know exactly where to click. No searching.
I went back and forth on this for a long time. I'm settled now.
Keep them together, organized by event, instead of splitting everything into a photos tree and a videos tree.
The reason is simple. When I go looking for video from an event, I usually need the photos from that event too. Two separate folder trees means two searches for one job.
Some things aren't tied to a year. Sermon videos, podcast episodes, media and checklist updates, headshots, countdown video assets.
Those get dedicated folders outside the year structure. You're not rebuilding the same folders every January, and nobody has to guess which year a thing got filed under.
Every new project gets the same five folders. Audio, footage, photos, project files, renders.
Then subfolders inside those. Audio splits into music and mics. Footage sorts by camera. Photos splits raw and edited.
The value here isn't the specific structure, it's that it's identical every time. Anyone on your team can open a project from two years ago and know where things are without asking.
Small thing, big payoff. Drag whatever you're actively working on into the sidebar so it's one click instead of six.
Take it out when the project's done. Otherwise the sidebar becomes its own mess.
A folder structure only helps if the rest of your team knows it. That's the part the Church Notion System handles, documenting how your church actually works so nobody has to ask you where things go.
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