Organizing Your Library

Organizing your library

Cove is built for libraries that become more structured over time. The right goal is not “classify everything perfectly immediately.” The right goal is to make the library easier to find, review, browse, and share every time you come back.

The main building blocks

• Videos, images, galleries, audio, and text are the primary records you browse.
• Performers and studios provide stable identities across many items.
• Tags describe what something is, what it contains, or how you want to use it later.
• Tag groups keep larger tag vocabularies from becoming flat and hard to reason about.
• Groups collect items intentionally, while dynamic groups update from rules or activity.

A practical organization loop

1. Scan or import media into Cove.
2. Add the broad metadata that helps you find it later.
3. Create the views you return to often with saved filters or dynamic groups.
4. Add more specific structure only where it pays off.
5. Review provenance when automated workflows changed something important.

That last step matters. A useful library is not only organized. It is understandable.

Tags versus groups

Use tags when:

• the label applies to many unrelated items
• you want the label to be searchable and reusable
• you want many overlapping labels on the same item

Use groups when:

• you are curating a collection intentionally
• order or membership matters
• you want a collection that behaves more like a chosen set than a shared label

Use dynamic groups when:

• the collection should update itself
• the result comes from a rule, filter, or activity pattern

When to go deeper

The library usually benefits most from deeper structure in a few places:

• high-value tags that you search often
• performer identity cleanup
• studio normalization
• recurring watch or review queues
• groups you revisit often

Once those are stable, you can add more advanced workflows such as contextual tagging, segments, sub-videos, and compilations where they actually help.