Ask HN: How do you manage your drone videos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage your drone videos?

11 pointsmannyv7 comments

The proliferation of drones makes me wonder: how do people manage their video library of footage?

How do you find where the footage was taken? Dates? Times? GPS track?

A quick search turned up nothing...but there must be something people are using now. What do you use?

I'd use the same thing I've been using forever... a little python batch file that creates a folder in the form

  /archive/2024/20240523/

I keep the folder and file names given by the sequence number in the camera. Any time I modify a file, I always save it with a new, and usually more descriptive, name.

Thus I'll end up with files like this

  /archive/2024/20240523/100D5100/DSC_8341.NEF

I've been storing things this way since 1997, I have local and remote backups of the entire /archive tree.

what do you use for remote backups?

I use backblaze, and have learned (the hard way) that you need to be careful about the default exclusions.... it excludes a lot of video file formats by default, which wasn't kind to my archive of camera stuff (with videos in it)

I just put them, along with all of my other photo/video on a local NAS that's backed up to an offsite and to backblaze. sticking to a consistent file naming method of your choice is the best, but that's entirely based on your needs.

Are you collecting footage as a personal archive, are you doing it as a business, or are you using drone footage as b-roll in a youtube video (whether for hobbiest pleasure or for youtube revenue)? to me, any of those cases would have a different naming and file management convention.

Same as photos, I edit them and upload to Flickr

Surely YouTube is a good platform for this.

Google Photos is good enough for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com