July 24, 2008 | 44 Comments

How Do You Organize Your Porn?

We’d like to think that there’s no such thing as too much porn. But when you’ve been collecting it for years, you have to question that assumption. Sure, having room upon room (or hard drive upon hard drive) full of smut seems like the ultimate in decadent living … but when you feel like rubbing one out in a hurry, you need to be able to quickly separate your dirtpipe milkshakes from your ass smoothies and find exactly what you’re looking for as quickly as possible. And sometimes excess comes at the expense of efficiency.

As the digital age has made the piling up of porn all too easy, this is a plight that many of us have come to know all too well. We recently heard from a reader who’s swimming in smut and desperate to know what he can do to sort things out …

I find myself having several gigs of porn on my computer (over 60 gig) and I’m running into an organizational problem. I have been altering the file names with codes to categorize my porn (as in having A for anal, for CP for cream pie) but it’s very cumbersome and I have to sort through it manually.

Are there any solutions out there that you know of that organizes porn in a very intuitive way? Do you think any of your reader base would know? If so, please tell me! I would love to hear a possible solution! If not, I plan on looking into writing an application with a sqlite database to easily tag porn and make searches very quick.

Since we’re usually too busy looking for porn to actually take the time to organize it, we figured we’d pass his question along to you, our savvy smut-loving readers.

So tell us: how do you organize your porn? Do you have a special system? Is there a program out there that easily and efficiently sorts and separates, keeping the MILFs away from the hot coeds and the messy facials apart from the anal cream pies? Is there a quick and easy solution — or are we all just destined to fight our way through an ever increasing amount of smut, closing our eyes and hoping for the best? Let us know your own personal tips and techniques for navigating your own personal porn archives in the comments.

· Thumbnails via Office Pink and Latin Teen Pass (officepink.com + latinteenpass.com, via Ask Jolene)

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Author:Lux Alptraum

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  • Anonymous

    tough problem. at 60 gigs, using the file system folders and manipulating filenames is pretty futile.

    the photo people have had this problem for awhile and the best they can come up with are programs that allow you to add metatags.

    Picasa comes to mind.

  • balthazar_b

    I actually use iTunes for this purpose. If you don’t want to pornify your regular iTunes library you can easily create a separate iTunes library just for your smut. If you hold down the option key while opening iTunes you will be given the option to create another library (this is on a Mac and I’m not sure what the shortcut is on a PC). You can keep your porn collection wherever it happens to be on your hard drive instead of copying all the videos to your iTunes library by unchecking the box that says “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” under the advanced settings. There are lots of fields you can use in iTunes to organize your collection including the Genre field which is searchable and sortable. Plus you can add cover art which is a nice touch I think.

  • hebear mcghee

    My organization is pretty low tech and relies on sparsity. I have a single folder into which torrents are downloaded. Movies are burned to DVD, while photos and single scenes are rarely archived, and normally deleted after a few weeks.

  • Brian47

    98% of my porn is all on DVD, the small amount downloaded from an online site (allkindsofgirls) I eventually burned to disc. The DVDs go into one of those large flip books, often used for CDs, and the DVD inserts I can slide into the pouches (teehee!) on either side. For awhile there was no order except for in the order I purchased them, but then I started selling DVDs from my collection online and this required some reshuffling. I then went to an all alphabetical order, then decided to keep the “Ass”-centric titles together, followed by “Big” (such as plump girls, large tits) titles, then MILFs, ethnic titles grouped (Latin, Black, Asian) together, Lesbian and finally vintage 70′s porn from Alpha Blue together. However, as I started receiving more porn to review online, I had to create separate groups for review DVDs and personal copies, only mixing in those reviewed into the personal that really won me over, otherwise they stay in a drawer – bad porn!

    So, I hope that helps confuse everyone! :)

  • Anonymous

    I have over 80 gigs of porn on a big hard drive one folder for pics another for videos.I never label just throw it in the folder.I am always looking for better ways to manage.

  • rad_matter

    My organization is low-tech as well; since I only collect lesbian and squirt porn (with some male/female intercourse), I just place all of it in a separate folder in “My Pictures” for my porn pictures and “My Videos” for my porn videos. And I know where my smut is because I have a picture of Sandra Lee in front of my smut. That way I won’t get always aroused when I see the folder if I need to go in My Pictures or Videos to look at something else. I hope this was helpful, or, at the very least, pretty damn amusing.

  • Lux Alptraum

    @rad_matter: The Sandra Lee confession made me giggle.

  • Anonymous

    There’s one giant folder on my desktop labeled “Porn”. Takes all the fun away from nosey people. Who sorts things?

  • Anonymous

    @rad_matter: my husband wouldn’t even need the porn behind her if he saw a Sandra Lee photo on the folder. He has such a MILF crush on her, though she’s only a stepmother.

  • Ayleron

    The only porn I store are porn comics and hentai. then everything is sorted by title in each category. Fairly straightforward.

  • Anonymous

    Dump it all in a folder, and then use a program like Pictomio to catalog it with meta info and such. So far it’s the only program I’ve found that will even come close to giving me the video thumbnails I want and manage everything with ratings and the like. Still, not as good as it should be (should let me scroll through the video and pick my own screenshot. Also, shouldn’t crash all the time). Anyone know of a video-cataloging program that can do this stuff? Basically like picasa and lightroom but for videos?

  • CloudCarrier

    I swore off keeping any sort of clips on my computer since my great laptop crash a few years ago (insert gangster teardrop), so I only keep a slew of pictures and videos on a separate server, a la photobucket, for emergencies/sort of safekeeping. And since the advent of youtube-style streaming adult sites, I use my bookmarks now more than ever.

    As for dvds, I used to be pretty meticulous about sorting them out, but once I bought my seventh 100-capacity wallet, I just outright gave up. The old filing system (amateur, classics, gonzo) just toppled out of capacity, and any new material either gets lumped in a drawer or piled on an empty spindle, depending on the quality/use/whim of any particular day.

    @PCBHo: Ms. DeLaurentiis, now quite 100% MILFy herself, pretty much has the same pants tightening effect on me, and I have to restrict myself to only an hour’s worth of her show at a time, lest I break my mind with horniness & hunger. Same goes for Ina (just don’t tell Jeffrey!).

  • naughtyduncan

    It was mentioned in the first comment, but get a program that lets you tag photos. I’m thinking iPhoto for example, though it didn’t have the best tagging system last time I was using it. The beauty of tagging is you can retrieve your porn in interesting ways if you tag well enough. Looking for dirt pipe milkshake pics, but only with blondes? In iPhoto you could do a smart search, ask for images tagged with “blonde” and “dirt pipe milkshake” and it retrieves just those photos you tagged that with those words.

    I really don’t keep movies or clips on the other hand. I just have them all categorized by title in one folder and I tend to toss them after they’ve been watched. Just takes too much hard drive space to keep a collection… though I did just get two backup drives…

  • hodayathink is walking in the glow of love

    And from this thread, an idea spreads:

    A video player with a library function with metatagging. Although to be honest, I think you might be able to come close with WMP11/Windows Vista, because I believe Vista lets you tag files if you want.

    Me, all videos, all in one folder, with subfolders for different websites, and as many as possible in WMP11 with the actor and director and occasionally studio placed in various fields. Works alright for me, and I think I’m up to about 250-300 GB of porn (and now that I type that, that is a hell of a lot of porn).

  • likefunbutnot

    My collection at the moment is about 9TB, all stored on a pair of local file servers. About 8TB of that is video, but I have around 1TB of pictures as well.

    I have incoming directories for unsorted material, but generally speaking, I try to break things up by the studio responsible (Girlfriend Films, say, vs. Danni.com vs. Playboy etc).

    For materials that I can’t categorize that way, either because I don’t know the producer or because it’s a one-off sort of deal (amateur stuff), I go ahead and but the material in a directory of generic content (Straight sex vs. Tranny Zombie Midget porn) or by the name of the principle performer (Faye Valentine, Tera Patrick etc) under a /starring directory.

    Video content mostly isn’t that bad. Images are nuts. When possible, I still try to categorize by model name, but if I don’t know it, or if she’s one of the billion or so Eastern European models, the images get filed by the studio or “branding” on the image (Femjoy, MetArt etc). Picture collections just stay in their own directories.

    Videos are indexed by name on my servers. I wrote a simple little web app that lets me search the whole collection by file name or with keywords gathered in a text file with the same name as the video (I make those myself, but only if I need to).

    I actually don’t have much difficulty remembering where I’ve put things, even through 9TB of data (that’s 150x more stuff than the guy with 60GB) and even without my little search tool. The whole project of constructing this system has really been an ongoing project to teach myself about Enterprise-level data storage and information retrieval. There’s a whole system of failsafes and backups that I’m not even talking about.

  • Lux Alptraum

    @likefunbutnot: “The whole project of constructing this system has really been an ongoing project to teach myself about Enterprise-level data storage and information retrieval. There’s a whole system of failsafes and backups that I’m not even talking about.”

    I love, love, love that you use organizing porn to teach yourself about Enterprise-level data storage and information retrieval.

    I used porn to teach myself how to make websites! Which doesn’t sound anywhere near as cool.

  • likefunbutnot

    @Lux Nightmare: I used porn to teach myself how to make websites! Which doesn’t sound anywhere near as cool. “

    It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you have no chance of touching an actual woman.

  • IDVariation

    I was at one point working on a porn periodic table. Anywhere from one to three letters would represent a specific aspect of the porn; Ls=lesbian Brn=brunette, Pg=pigtails, etc. I would combine the porn “chemicals” and could look at each movie name and read it like a chemical formula. LsBrnPg would be Lesbian brunettes with pigtails.

  • Anonymous

    I have spent years trying to answer this one, and ultimately decided not to put everything into a database. Given that the majority of my downloaded porn was random, mostly amateur video clips, I organized first by sex act or participant description/count. I had to make some fairly deep sub-folders for sites, online friends (for trades), porn stars, and celebrities categories. The sites and porn stars differentiation was tough, as the line there was blurry.

    If you want way too much detail, here’s the hierarchy.
    - Anal
    - Anime
    - Audio (love to listen)
    - Blowjobs
    - Celebrities
    – Paris Hilton and Jenna Lewis in here, among others
    - Cum Shots
    - Cunnilingus
    - Facials
    - Groups
    - Hand Jobs
    - Hentai
    - Hidden Camera
    - Humor
    - Masturbation
    – Male
    – Female
    – Mutual
    - Miscellaneous (no directory is complete without it)
    - Online Friends (met online and traded)
    - Personal (original content ;) )
    - Porn Stars
    - Public Sex
    - Series (random finds of multiple videos)
    - Sex (odd that this actually deserves its own directory)
    - Sites
    – Honest amateur sites, like, well, That Strange Girl
    – Genre-specific like Homeclips or Bang Bus
    - Squirting (you go, girl)
    - Sybian
    - Tribadism
    - Voyeur

  • Anonymous

    @IDVariation I love that concept – worth a try

  • MalzyWheels

    @likefunbutnot: You’re my hero!
    I too used the power of porn to hone my website making skills.

    As for organizing, I have one major folder that’s for complete generic straight features, making sure they’re titled accurately. I will create special folders for special genres like BBW, transsexuals, gloryholes, and theater sex. I also have a folder for individual scenes and my favorite actresses.

  • Lux Alptraum

    @likefunbutnot: Or when you’re young and poor and looking to run a porn site. That was my excuse!

  • hodayathink is walking in the glow of love

    @likefunbutnot: You sound like me, but more driven (and probably a little bit smarter). One of my goals in the near future is to try to get a server set up w/ Flash installed, and be able to have a web interface to search through all of my media (movies, music, pictures) by filename, metadata, and/or keywords, then be able to either download or, especially in the case of music and movies, stream in the webpage. The first step is making the system (slightly expensive, but not horribly difficult). The hard part is going to be paying for the bandwidth to make it worthwhile. I really wish someone would make FiOS available in the Chicagoland area.

    P.S. – I know Orb does much of the same stuff, but I tried it once and the interface just seriously wasn’t for me. I hated it.

    P.P.S. – 9TB?! Well, I’ve got a ways to go.

  • Learethak

    Mine is relatively simple. All initial downloads are dumped into the Unsorted folder. They live there for at least two viewings and if the survive being deleted for being even the tiniest bit irritating they are moved to either Clips, Films, Hentai, or Pics.

    There are some subfolders in each of the (Asia Carrera for example has her own folders in all of them except Hentai) but rarely do I break it down anymore then that.

    I also do periodic ruthless purges where I watch random 15 second snippets and if the porn has reminded me of why I kept in in 3-4 clips I dump it.

  • Anonymous

    I tried doing the same thing as the periodic table commenter but when faster than dial up internet came along and longer videos with multiple acts came the idea crumbled.

    I’ve since become the fan of a handful of stars and gather mostly their works and separate their videos by name then date.

    I leave everything else to streaming video like youporn and redtube

  • Anonymous

    I split it into Video Quality, then split it into pro/amateur. Then go into hair color. Then outfit. If it needs any more description i try to do that in the title. With small icons it goes a long way. That is for clips at least. For full length features there is a folder for that. I don’t really do pics. This goes for all porn except of course for things featuring Teagan and Jesse Jane. They get their own folder outside of the whole structure.

  • Anonymous

    @CloudCarrier: you heart Ina?!!?! OH MY GOD! I love you! She’s my favorite. I’d go gay for her.

  • I.M.B.Y What’s THIS for…!

    Man, this old fart has moved completely past you guys/

    AEBN. Why have anything on your hard drive?
    I started with JT’s Stockroom as my portal to AEBN then I chatted with Kevin Ducatti at Ducatti films and I saw he had a portal too. Now Fleshbot has one, and I must say a dam good one(I have found a new preversion with the listing of the naked mechanical bullrider vids).

    I would grab all pics and use a slide show set to randomize. I used the “am I horny now?” method to select the best pics. If I looked at the pics in .jpeg and fax viewer and if I didn’t instantly feel aroused it stayed in the “New” folder. Those that made it to “updater” folder (sssh ;) it’s a secret) were the slide show. Who wants to look up a freakin data base? Either it’s hot or it’s not, right? There is something cool about flashing a bondage pic, followed by some great Penthoue poon, then a DP.

    P.S. I taught myself video editing and After Effects with porn. (Take a pop shot and make the guy shoot fireworks, it’s a cool exercise : )

  • Lux Alptraum

    The person who asked this question emailed me the following:

    I actually just found a solution after reading the user comments about using iTunes to organize porn. I also use a Mac and I have not been tapping a resource built into the OS: Spotlight. All I have to do is add comments to the file (as in all the “tags” I want to use for that particular video file) and Spotlight finds it beautifully. I imagine this can be done in Windows/Linux as well, using Google desktop search (or the built-in search with Windows Vista).

  • Anonymous

    I have a great solution. Unfortunately, it’s Mac-only, and the software is not free.

    I would give Leap a try (Homepage: [bit.ly]). It uses the Spotlight tags Lux just mentioned to organize files. It’s meant to be a finder replacement. You can tag files with whatever you want.
    I tend to tag my videos with category (bigboobs, ffm, etc.), name of actors, and a star-rating between * and *****. It’s very easy to filter your videos, images, or whatever by tags, folders, dates, file-sizes, or any combination.

    Unfortunately, the program is $60, but I had already purchased it to use primarily as a finder replacement for managing my files.
    Lifehacker did an article about an older version of Leap at [bit.ly] The current version has a spruced-up interface, and is very nice.

    Hope that helps.

  • Anonymous

    I’ve gone with avi/mpg/else/pics/comix basic folders and tagged most filenames with more specific info bdsm/hentai/squirt/trio etc. Renamer is a great free windows app for batch renaming. But now, with some 190gb, I’m actually looking for a good app to clip movies into scenes without too much technical babble, so that I can actually only keep the scenes I’m into (I very seldom truly like a whole film and this makes it hard to use the quick-preview-then-delete-or-not approach mentioned by Learethak above). If I manage to find something to do this clipping thing then I might go into Picasa or iTunes tagging to make things more manageable and specific.

  • Anonymous

    iPhoto can be useful for but cumbersome unless you break up your libraries.

    One issue I could not find was an automator script to download photos and deposit them in an album with the name of the Site Title.

    I have written one here: [www.ibitchslap.com]

    Then use iPhoto Buddy to break up your Libraries.

    I then stick your libraries on TrueCrypt.

    If you have request for improvements let me know.

  • Anonymous

    @likefunbutnot:

    I have a similar collection/storage method. I’ve used my skills as a programmer to create a whole database with a local webpage frontend. When I download a new video I add it to the database, it creates screen shots every few minutes into the video, and tries to guess from the filename what other information about the file like who’s in it, what site it’s from and what genres it’s in. Or I can add those thing manually.

    Then I can quickly get to whatever I want by the star, site/studio or genre. Each video has it’s page with the video embedded on one side, the screens on the other and links to the stars pages so I can see other scenes they are in. Also I can bookmark certain points and jump straight to them.

    It’s actually a great way to learn programming, I’m on my second version of it and I’m always adding to it as my collection grows.

  • Anonymous

    Like norcal_scott, I organize by “activity” … but take it a step further to subcategorize by hair color of the primary participant.

    @IDVariation: I LOVE the idea of the periodic table… what help do you need to finish it?

  • Lux Alptraum

    @evilgiu: You should be able to find a program that will allow you to record the screen of your computer during specific scenes of a movie, so you can save just the special scenes. For Macs, there’s Snapz Pro — that’s what I use to create the preview clips of DVDs I review, and how I make the clips for the video roundups. I know there’s a similar program for PCs that Dash uses, but I’ll have to ask him what it is.

  • Anonymous

    As an IT guy who works with issues of content tagging, information retrieval and discovery in Real Life (except as applied to boring stuff like corporate policy documents and marketing collateral), I’ve occasionally considered applying similar concepts and tools to my porn repository, but in the end I settle for a fairly straightforward hierarchical folder structure, sorted first by media (movies, pictures, toons, text), then by a totally inconsistent personal taxonomy based on subject (blondes, lez, interracial, fetish, bdsm) and (for toons) artist.

    While I could work up some combination of tooling and tagging that lets me find all my Dolcett toons showing blonde brides being spiked by black midgets, I prefer the carnal serendipity of random browsing. I also don’t let Spotlight index these folders, which might otherwise be useful — it’s a family machine, and I’d just as soon not have it come back in a random search, don’t trust the security trimming.

    So far it all fits on a single hard disk (about 30GB), every now and then I’ll archive all the pix to DVD and start completely fresh, as I find I get tired of the same stuff all the time. I’ve started moving a bit towards pure online browsing/fapping without saving locally (the “porn cloud”, if you will), but I’m still old school about hoarding against the Death of the Internet.

  • Anonymous

    Personally, I prefer XnView (xnview.com). At first blush it looks like an image browser, but it actually supports movies very well and has extensive metadata features (ratings, categorization, etc.) as well as nice EXIF editing.

  • Anonymous

    As one who in Real Life deals with managing large collections of corporate information with similar issues, I’ve often considered setting up some sort of tooling and tagging to allow me to find all my Dolcett toons showing a blonde bride getting spiked by a black midget, but in the end I prefer the carnal serendipity of random browsing. 30GB on a single disk, in a simple folder hierarchy sorted by media (video, pix, toons, docs) then by subject (blondes, bdsm, interracial, lez) and (for toons) by artist.

    While I keep my toons and video intact, I occasionally (every few years) archive my pix collection to DVD and start from scratch, as I get bored looking at the same collection. Eventually I expect I can probably rotate back an old set once it’s been long enough, though I haven’t yet.

    For certain content I’ve also started relying on pure online browsing / fapping without saving locally — call it the “Porn Cloud” — but I’m still Old School enough to want to hoard goodies against some future rainy day if the bounty dries up.

  • Anonymous

    I have 1TB of pr0n movies …. I am trying to sort the movies for their speciality … but this is really a pain in the ass.

    I especially like Eva Angelina, so I have a folder with all here movies. I also like Marc Dorcel movies, so I have a folder with all that movies.

    Though its no big deal. I get depression because everybody has a bigger thing than I do and produces more “sirup” … so I hate watching that shit anyway …

    Actually it makes me very sad, I wish I had a girlfriend that tells me to delete all that shit and talk with here instead while drinking a lovly cup of tee.

  • Anonymous

    For a while there, I did the whole “tag the filename with fiddly bits and sort into hundreds of folders” thing. I even made up names for actresses I didn’t know, so that I could sort together pictures of the same actress from multiple sources!
    By now, my tastes have gotten a bit more refined, and as storage space gets tighter, I’m pickier about what I download and keep–it really has to be something that gets me going! As well, I found that by the time I had lots and lots of folders, each one had only a few things in it, which made jumping from one thing to another and keeping up with the whole thing a huge chore.
    Nowadays, I sort into folders with broader categories (“Cute,” “Lesbian,” and so forth) and then sort more specifically under them to keep series together and identify favorites. I’ve found the “color labels” feature in Mac OS X’s Finder to be very useful: I label things that are particular favorites red for easy finding, and so forth.
    I’ll second the call for TrueCrypt (truecrypt.org): one quick 50GB volume is well worth the peace of mind knowing it won’t be stumbled over or pop up in Spotlight searches at embarrassing times!
    My biggest problem at this point is sorting through older stuff and looking for duplicates: I’ve yet to find any good software (particularly for the Mac) that’s any good at identifying duplicate pictures. I used to have something on Windows that would identify duplicates and display them side-by-side so you could verify them, but I haven’t seen that in years. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

  • Anonymous

    Personaly, I use WACS for my p0rn.
    http://wacsip.sourceforge.net/

    and I get most of the content from aw http://www.adultwork.co.uk and I love this model http://www.simplymia.net

  • mygawkername

    Organize? That’s impossible.

    I’m good for about 4 minutes of that and then I get, um, distracted. Then I don’t care about organizing that stuff.

  • graphicwave

    I might as well jump on the train….
    I have about 2 Terabytes on data DVD sorted by website. Download from site, put on disk and label as site name (Clubhardball disk 1, ect.). That really sucks as far as organization. I bought two external 500gb drives when I got a year subscription to Brazzers.com and just started organizing everything by girl name. I find I don’t really give a shit about which site it came from because when I want to watch something old, I find myself looking for a particular girl. I just built a ubuntu home server (fuck searching through DVDs) and I plan to keep filing by name. Any full movie downloaded from bittorrents are filed by name of the movie. Any zip files I get from picture sites I always extract one picture from the set and keep it with the zip file. I DO like the iTunes idea, though. I might give that a try.

  • Anonymous

    Interesting reading through the replies as I’m just getting to the point where it’s becoming difficult to filter out everything I don’t want to see and find that particular type of video/picture set that I’m feeling into at the time. Will have to have a better read of everything and take the time (at some point!) to put together a more efficient filing system.

    I do have one or two tips though…

    Separating Pro from Amateur porn is always a good start, knowing if I want to see a girl strip on webcam I head to Amateur and if I’m up for a pro solo girl video… well you get the picture, with separate folders branching off from those two going into videos, pics, particular girls etc. It’s hardly ground breaking but could be a good place to start for anyone staring blankly at all their files.

    If you use Mac OS X, you can easily turn all your video/pic files into a sort of ‘Tube site’ esque display in a finder window, for example… I have just over 300 Amateur porn videos in one folder, all named by either the girls name or if I dont know it, just a 4/5 word title to describe whats going on. All the videos are then color coded (Red for a favourite and down to green which is generally something I won’t watch regularly but also dont want to lose). Next you simply go to view options and turn file preview on, giving you a small thumbnail pic instead of the file type icon, this doesn’t work for FLV files though, but you can get around it with a bit of work by taking a screenshot of the video playing, then saving it as a jpg and copy and pasting into the Get Info pane for that video, achieving the same thumbnail effect. Then simply make the file icons size alot bigger and you have a clear view of every video and can browse at your leisure! Takes a while, but it is so worth it.. especially in Leopard using the cover flow view and previewing videos, alot of fun, taking the tedium out of browsing your vids!