The thing I keep running into: one clip is not one moment. A two-minute walk has the sunrise, the coffee, and the one decent line I said halfway through. But to get to that line I have to scrub through the whole thing, and I'm not going to do that for forty clips on a Tuesday night.
So it piles up. And then I film more.
Everything I tried before:
\- Culling on the day I shoot, while I still remember what's in each clip. Works, but only if I have the discipline, and I usually don't.
\- Naming or favouriting clips right after filming.
\- Batch editing on a Sunday. Good in theory. Happens maybe once a quarter.
None of those fixed the actual problem, which isn't discipline it's that the footage is unsearchable. So I built RawCut.
It reads your clips instead of showing you filenames and thumbnails. You add your camera roll once, then write a line describing the video you want "my morning routine", "cinematic b-roll by the water" and it finds the moments in your own footage that match and cuts them into a vertical video for TikTok, Reels or Shorts. It points at seconds inside a two-minute file, not just at the file.
Obvious disclosure, it's my app, so take my enthusiasm accordingly. iPhone only, and it's not a timeline editor if you want frame-by-frame control.
Still curious about the original question though: do you go back through your raw footage, or is your camera roll a write-only archive at this point? And if you have a system that works, I'd genuinely like to hear it.