How to name stock footage files

Stock footage file naming rules by agency

The three agencies publish their rules in different places: Shutterstock in its upload troubleshooting article, Pond5 on its footage preparation page, Adobe only in its CSV pages. The table puts them side by side. A blank answer means the agency publishes nothing on that point.

The strictest rule on each line wins if you sell at all three. In practice that means plain ASCII letters, digits and underscores, nothing else, and a name short enough for Adobe's CSV.

Shutterstock: letters, digits and underscores

Shutterstock gives a closed list. In its words, file names "may contain only the characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and underscore". Accented Latin characters and non-Latin alphabets are not permitted, and punctuation other than the underscore, such as brackets, parentheses or quotation marks, "may cause an error during uploading".

Two consequences are easy to miss. A space is not on the allowed list, so sunset beach.mov breaks the rule even though it contains no punctuation. And a copy made by your operating system, such as clip (1).mov, fails twice: the space and the parentheses. The dot before the extension is part of every file name; Shutterstock's own CSV example uses germanshepard.mov.

The rule sits in a troubleshooting article rather than in the technical requirements, so it shows up when an upload has already failed. The rest of the upload steps are in how to upload video to Shutterstock.

Pond5: no accents, spaces or dashes

Pond5's footage preparation page has a File Names section with three sentences: file names must not contain special characters or accents; examples include &, å, ñ, é, ß, ®, ©, §, ç, ä, ø, ü, curly quote marks and commas; and "spaces and dashes are not allowed".

The dash rule is the one that catches people. Hyphenated names like lake-annecy-01.mov are common on the web, and Pond5 does not allow them. The underscore is not in Pond5's list of examples, and Shutterstock names it as allowed, so it is the separator to use.

Pond5 keeps the name you uploaded: its Uploads page shows it under the Tech Data tab as the Original Filename. The same page asks you not to put number codes in titles, such as "Pink Flamingo 001", and points to that Original Filename for tracking instead. The number belongs in the file name, never in the title. The full Pond5 flow is in how to upload video to Pond5.

Adobe Stock: 30 characters in the CSV

Adobe does not publish a character list for uploaded clips. Its rules on file names live in the CSV pages, and they matter as soon as you add metadata in bulk:

• The Filename column takes the exact file name with its extension, for example Myvideo1.mov, and is limited to 30 characters.
• The name in the CSV must match the uploaded file exactly, "including extensions and character casing". A clip uploaded as Harbor_01.MOV does not match a row that says harbor_01.mov.
• Adobe warns that even a minor typo stops the metadata from connecting to the clip.
• The CSV file itself should have no spaces in its name and follow a consistent pattern, such as Name_Date.csv.

Thirty characters go fast. harbor_sunrise_aerial_0001.mov is exactly 30 with its extension; one more word and the row no longer fits. The other CSV rules, from the 70-character title to the category number, are in the Adobe Stock CSV guide.

One naming pattern for all three agencies

Put the rules together and a safe file name has five properties:

1. Lower-case ASCII letters and digits only, so letter case never causes a mismatch.
2. Underscores between words: no spaces, no hyphens, no other punctuation.
3. No accents: write cafe, not café.
4. 30 characters or fewer, extension included, for Adobe's CSV.
5. A running number, so every clip in your archive has a unique name.

A pattern such as subject_place_0001.mov meets all five and still tells you what the clip is when you scroll a folder. A short shoot code works too, for example annecy24_0001.mov, if you keep a log of what each code means.

Do not try to pack keywords into the name. None of the agency pages cited here says the file name feeds search; the title or description, the keywords and the category do that. How to write those is covered in titles and descriptions for stock footage.

File names inside CSV files

A CSV attaches metadata to clips by file name, which is why naming mistakes surface there first. Each agency has its own column:

• Upload the clips first. Shutterstock warns that a CSV uploaded before the files may return a "File Not Found" error, because the names it refers to do not exist yet.
• Name releases with the same care. Adobe's Releases column takes 30 characters, and when two releases share a name it uses the most recent. Pond5's release column takes the release file name with its extension.
• Keep names unique across shoots. Two clips called clip_01.mov from different days make a CSV row ambiguous to you, even if the agency stores them separately.

Whether a CSV or embedded metadata suits your workflow better is compared in XMP or CSV for video metadata.

Renaming a shoot before upload

Rename on your computer, before the upload. None of the three agencies describes a way to rename a file once it is in your account, and the CSV has to carry the name the clip was uploaded under.

• Avoid the default batch rename in Windows File Explorer. Selecting several files and renaming them produces names like Lake (1).mov, with a space and parentheses that neither Shutterstock nor Pond5 allows. Use a batch-rename tool that lets you set an underscore and a zero-padded number.
• Fix the extension case at the same time. Many cameras write upper-case extensions such as .MOV or .MP4. Lower case avoids Adobe's exact-match problem.
• Keep a log. A two-column sheet with the camera name and the new name lets you trace a clip back to its original file if a client or an agency asks.
• Rename exports, not camera originals. Your editing project still points at the original files; renaming the exported clips leaves it intact.

File names are one line of the checklist. Resolution, frame rate, length and codec for each agency are on the stock video requirements page.