The accumulation of digital assets for me seems to be growing exponentially over the past decade. As I look at the camera roll on my iPhone right now it says I have 20,000+ photos! That’s insane because I know I have already uploaded and removed a lot from my phone by now.
I have hundreds of audio files as well from the start of my podcasting days. There’s the audio file for each microphone that was recorded onto my H6 Zoom and then the file where I mixed down all the mic tracks for each of the episodes. That’s 206 episodes for We the Switch podcast. There’s the video for 100 of those episodes coming out of 2 cameras as well.
My DSLR camera was a file production device that created files for photos and videos and then there’s the writing stuff — I have notes, word docs, and scanned pdf images of written entries I have had over the past couple of years.
If I want to locate a file I would like to do so in the most efficient manner without burning through my mental energy just looking for it. I would like to key into the search box and get to my files immediately depending on what I’m looking for and this is why a digital filing system is important from a creative standpoint.
So… you want to locate that audio file from 2018 at the beach to use as the background ambient noise for a video that you’ll be creating?
If you have a filing system in place you can search: “audio – beach – 2018” and then you can search: “video – sunset at beach – 2018” and voila you now have the files to create this video you’ve been procrastinating on creating until now that you’re in 2021… but that’s a story for another post.