Organize drone footage and video by date

A shoot ends and the card comes off looking like a ransom note: DJI_0042.MP4, GX010078.MP4, DJI_0042.SRT, a .LRF proxy for every clip, an .INSV from the 360 rig, and a fistful of stills. Copy it all to the PC and Windows stamps everything with today’s date, so the folder tells you nothing about when — or where — any of it was shot. Do that after every flight and every trip and you end up with a drive full of DJI_ and GX files no human can read.

Elegant File Explorer untangles that card for you: it recognizes each device’s files, sorts them into dated folders, and renames the cryptic ones into something you can actually scan — all on your own PC, nothing uploaded. The Drone & Action Cam and Photo & Video packs are built for exactly this workflow.

Drone and action-cam footage, by date and readable#

Two recipes handle the two devices most creators fly and film with.

• “DJI / Drone by date” recognizes DJI drone files — the ones that start with DJI_ — and files them into Drone by year and month, renaming each to a clean 2026-06-05_name, tagged Drone. A folder of DJI_0042 turns into an organized, dated flight log in one pass.
• “GoPro / Action Cam by date” does the same for GoPro clips — the GH010001, GX010001, GOPR0001 naming — filing them into Action Cam by year and month, renamed and tagged GoPro. The end of cryptic names.

Both organize by the file’s date and rename to a sortable 2026-06-05_name pattern, so your footage lines up chronologically instead of by whatever order the card happened to copy.

Sweep the junk the drone leaves behind#

Every DJI flight drops helper files next to the video that you never actually want in the archive. “DJI: sweep telemetry (.srt) and proxies (.lrf)” recognizes them — DJI-named .srt telemetry and low-res .lrf proxies — and moves them into Drone\Telemetry and proxies, tagged Telemetry. What’s left in your footage folder is just the real videos.

Shooting immersive? “Insta360 and 360 cameras by month” gathers the .insv and .insp files from Insta360 and other 360 rigs into 360 by year and month, tagged 360 — the spherical material no ordinary player opens, kept separate and ready for Insta360 Studio.

The full card ingest, in one click#

When you want the whole card dealt with at once, “Card ingest (photo, video and RAW)” is the working flow. It takes everything off the card — photos, videos and RAW from any camera — files it into Imports by year, month and day, and renames each file to 2026-06-05_name, tagged Imported. Chaotic card to a professional, dated archive in a single pass.

If you’d rather build a smaller rule yourself first, here’s a clean one for the 360 files:

1. Open Auto-organization and click + New rule.
2. Rule name: 360 clips.
3. Monitored folders: + Add folder, Browse…, pick your Pictures folder.
4. Which files (conditions): with the tab on Any (OR), add an “Extension is” condition — .insv, .insp.
5. What to do (actions): “Move to” → a Pictures\360 folder.

Click “Simulate effect” for the Preview — nothing is actually changed, then “Save rule” — or just pick any of these from the Recipe Gallery, which fills the rule in for you.

The heavy footage and the finished exports#

Two more recipes keep the edit tidy. “Heavy videos in one place” moves clips over 100 MB into a Raw folder, tagged Raw, pulling the heavyweights out of the way for backup and editing. And “Tag final exports” finds files with final, export or render in the name, tags them Delivery and gathers them into an Exports folder — the shortcut to the good version when a client asks for it.

If your edit lives in Premiere, After Effects or DaVinci, the creation pack adds two you’ll want: “Final video renders by month” files your exported videos (named render, master, final, export) into Videos\Renders by month, tagged Render, keeping the delivery separate from the raw material; and “Sweep editing proxies” rounds up the proxy files that double a project’s size into Videos\Proxies, tagged Proxy, so you can clear them out when the project closes.

A note on capture dates: video vs. photo#

Here’s an honest distinction worth making. The drone, action-cam and card-ingest recipes organize your footage by the file’s date and rename it to a sortable pattern — that’s what keeps a card dump in chronological order. Reading the true moment of capture out of the file itself is something the app does specifically for photos, via their EXIF data: it can sort your stills by the real date they were shot and even file them by camera model. If your work mixes stills and footage, our file automation guide for photographers covers that EXIF side in full, and organizing photos by capture date goes deeper on the photo workflow. The {year}, {month} and {day} tokens the footage recipes use are all in our guide to file placeholders.

Nothing is deleted, everything can be previewed#

Automating an irreplaceable set of footage is a fair thing to hesitate over. Two features settle it. “Simulate effect” shows the full outcome — every move and rename — before a single file changes. And every run is logged, so “Undo” reverses it: moving is moving, never deleting. You can watch the card ingest, the telemetry sweep, the rename — each one — in the preview first, then reverse it if it wasn’t what you wanted. Your footage is never at risk from a rule you can preview and undo.