How to sort GoPro footage by person

Copy a GoPro card to your computer and you get a 100GOPRO folder holding several hundred files called things like GX010023.MP4. Here's how to split that into folders named after each person — and how to deal with the quirks that only GoPro has.

Why a GoPro folder is such a mess

Three things stack up:

• The filenames tell you nothing. GX010023.MP4 gives you no idea who's in it.
• Every clip drags two or three files along. A .LRV and a .THM get written alongside it, so the folder looks two or three times bigger than it is.
• Long recordings are split across files. One press of record does not mean one file.

What .LRV and .THM are, and whether to delete them

Both are sidecar files with no bearing on your original quality. If you're not using the GoPro app and you edit and archive on a computer, deleting them does nothing to the originals. Before you delete, though, do check that an .MP4 with the same name actually exists.

whosewave leaves both out of the list automatically. It knows they're sidecars even though the extension looks video-ish, so there's no need to clean them out first.

Chaptered files — they don't sort next to each other

GoPro doesn't keep a long recording as a single file; it cuts it at a fixed size and continues in the next one. The rest of the same take ends up as a separate file.

That causes a practical annoyance. Sorted by filename, the continuation of a take does not land next to its beginning. GoPro puts the chapter number near the front of the name and the take number at the back, which scatters them:

So partway through sorting, a scene you swear you already handled shows up again. Nothing has gone wrong — just assign the same person again. Both files end up in the same folder.

Watch out when you have several SD cards

Every GoPro card uses the same 100GOPRO folder name, and the filenames repeat from card to card. Card A has a GX010001.MP4. So does card B.

Pour several cards into one folder and the names collide. Copying in Explorer throws up "replace the file in the destination?", and clicking through it without reading loses one of them.

When whosewave organizes them, colliding names aren't overwritten — they're renamed to GX010001 (2).MP4. But getting the cards onto the computer happens outside this tool, so at that stage you're safer giving each card its own folder.

The steps

1. Copy the SD card to your computer. With several cards, give each one its own folder.
2. Open whosewave and choose that folder. .LRV and .THM drop out on their own; only the .MP4 files are listed.
3. Look at four frames per clip and assign a name. Type the name the first time a person appears; after that it's a number key.
4. Hit organize. You'll see which folders are about to be created and how many clips go in each, then it runs once you confirm.

Until that last step, your originals are untouched. The controls are covered in more detail under how it works.

If GoPro clips show no preview

GoPro records H.264 or H.265 (HEVC) MP4, which generally opens without trouble. When it doesn't, it's almost always HEVC decoding.

• Windows — installing HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store fixes it. To check whether you already have decoding, type chrome://gpu into Chrome's address bar and look at Video Acceleration Information.
• macOS — nothing to install. Chrome decodes HEVC through macOS directly.

And again: even with no preview, naming and organizing work exactly the same. Moving files has nothing to do with decoding them. There's more detail under camera support.

Other guides

• How to organize hundreds of video files into folders
• How to organize drone footage by person
• How to sort snowboard and ski footage by person