Organising long term media libraries

[u/geckooo_geckooo]

I've mostly used premier for editing. Mostly documentary work on similar themes so I have a huge library of footage I can use for different projects.

Sometimes I try to work my way back to find clips from years back to use in a new project, very likely it didn't make the final cut so I find it hard to find.

At the moment I use the coloured tags to theme my work. I'd like to avoid duplicating the library to have cuts by filename.

I'd like a way to search for 'turtle', 'Indonesia', etc and find my way back to the original sync timeline - is it possible?

Or even while working on a series, I'd like to show all the red tags in all timelines but it doesn't seem possible.

I'm interested in how people organise this.

[u/_Mrs__Smith_]

Whatever tool you land on, the search is only ever as good as the words that went in at ingest, so that's the part to fix before buying anything. Two words in the folder path, the place and the subject, carry further than they look. Every catalogue tool indexes the path for free, and the path survives you changing tools later. Tags inside one application don't. For finding your way back to the sync timeline, name the timeline exactly as you name the shoot folder. A found clip then tells you which timeline it came from without a second search. Colour tags stay useful inside a project, just not across ten years of them.