How to organize hundreds of video files into folders

You dumped a card straight off the camera and now one folder holds several hundred clips. Here's how to split them into folders — one per person, or per subject — for free, with nothing to install.

Why File Explorer makes this so slow

Organizing video is far more tedious than organizing photos, for one reason: the filename tells you nothing about what's in the clip.

Cameras name files GX010023.MP4, DJI_0157.MP4, IMG_4821.MOV. With photos you can skim the preview pane and pick them out. With video you can't. All Explorer or Finder gives you is a single first frame, and that frame is usually the sky, the ground, or the half-second before anything started.

So you end up opening them one at a time. At ten seconds a clip, two hundred clips is over half an hour — spent bouncing between a media player and a file window the entire time.

Why date and filename tools can't do this

Plenty of programs will sort files for you automatically. Almost all of them work off one of these:

Sorts by	Works for	Doesn't work for
Capture date	Splitting a card into folders per day	Everything shot on the same day stays in one pile
Filename pattern	Separating cameras, or number ranges	Anything the filename doesn't already say
File type or size	Splitting photos from video	Nothing to do with content

They share a limit: they can only sort by what is already written into the file. And the split most people actually want isn't written into the file anywhere — who is in the shot never is.

If you spent a day filming a group and now want to send each person their own clips, no amount of metadata gets you there. A human has to look. What you can automate isn't the judgment — it's everything around the judgment.

Sorting by what's in the clip

whosewave is a free tool aimed at exactly that gap. For each clip it puts four frames pulled from the body of the video on one screen. You say who it is, and it jumps straight to the next clip. No playing, no scrubbing, no window switching — just look and press a key.

The four frames come from splitting the clip into six parts, throwing away the first and last part, and grabbing the middle of the four that remain — 25%, 41.7%, 58.3% and 75% of the way through. The ends get dropped because that's usually setup and wrap-up footage, where you can't tell who's in frame anyway.

Your footage is never uploaded. The browser reads it directly off your own disk and only draws it on screen. Creating the folders and moving the files also happens entirely on your machine. Nothing is sent anywhere, so hundreds of gigabytes cost you no transfer time at all — and it keeps working with the internet unplugged.

The workflow, start to finish

Pick the folder — choose the folder your clips are sitting in. Only files directly inside it are read; subfolders are left alone.
Sort — four frames per clip, and you assign a name. Once a name exists you can stamp it with the 1–9 number keys, so your hand barely moves.
Run it — you get a summary of which folders will be created and how many clips go in each. Confirm, and the folders appear and the files move.

Until you run step 3, nothing touches your original files. While you're sorting, it only reads.

The controls are written up in more detail under how it works.

Move or copy?

	Move	Copy
Originals	Relocated into the person's folder	Left exactly where they are
Disk space	No extra space used	Uses the size of the footage again
Speed	Instant, within the same drive	Scales with file size

A move within the same drive doesn't physically relocate anything — it just rewrites where the file lives. 100 GB or 1 TB, it's over in a blink. That's why move is the default.

Copy is there for when you don't want the source folder touched — for instance when you haven't formatted the card yet and want the originals left intact. Just know it doubles the space used and takes time proportional to the footage size.

Things worth knowing before you run it

Duplicate filenames are never overwritten. They get renamed to name (2).mp4. So two different cards both containing GX010001.MP4 is safe.
A clip can have more than one person in it. In move mode the original goes to the first person's folder and the rest get copies.
You can close the tab mid-way. Progress is saved automatically — pick the same folder again and it offers to pick up where you left off.
Unsorted clips stay put by default. If you'd rather, you can send them all to an _unsorted folder instead.

Which files it will read

Only these extensions are picked up from the folder you choose. Photos, logs and anything else mixed in are simply ignored.

mp4 mov m4v avi mkv webm mts m2ts wmv flv 3gp mpg mpeg ts

Whether the preview actually renders depends on whether your browser can decode that particular video. There's a per-camera breakdown under camera support. Worth noting: even with no preview, naming and organizing still work normally — moving a file has nothing to do with decoding it.

Guides for specific cameras

How to sort GoPro footage by person — the 100GOPRO folder, and what to do about .LRV and .THM sidecars
How to organize drone footage by person — DJI .LRF and .SRT files, and clips with several people in them

What you need

A computer with Chrome or Edge. Reading and writing a folder on your own machine only works in those two browsers. There's nothing to install, no account, and no payment.

It does not work on phones — including Chrome on Android. Mobile browsers have no folder access at all.

← Open the tool