The reality of case media
No case arrives as a clean folder. It arrives as a USB stick, a folder of screenshots, a video you can’t re-capture, and a ZIP someone renamed. Structure is what turns that mess into a record.
A project is one source of truth
The first structural decision is also the most important one: everything for a case lives in a single project. Not a handful of scattered folders — one project that holds the media, your notes, and your working state together. When the media, the structure, and the review all share one home, a question like “which file was this face found in?” stops being a scavenger hunt and becomes a single look-up.
Keep the original sources untouched and treat the project as the thing you actually work in. That separation — source frozen, project authoritative — is what keeps a week of messy work from turning into a week of second-guessing.
Storage: USB, SSD, and shares
Where the media lives matters less than how consistently it does. In practice a case might sit on a USB stick handed to you, an SSD with a device export, or a network share that half the team edits. Each of those is workable; what is not workable is assuming any of them is stable, complete, or the same thing next week.
Practical rules that hold up: give each source its own clearly named location; write-protect or copy originals instead of working on them in place; and when a share is the source, pull a verified local copy into the project first. A project built above one copy of the evidence is far easier to defend than one built above whoever happens to have the latest version.
Bring your whole case in
Folders, drives, and shares — free on Windows & macOS.
Folder structure that survives a week
A structure is good if it still makes sense when it’s someone else’s problem — a colleague, a reviewer, or you-with-amnesia. The pattern that keeps holding: source, working, and output as distinct levels, with the source level never edited.
- Sources — one folder per origin (the USB stick, the share, the ZIP), contents untouched.
- Working — extracted copies and subfolders you actually organize and review against.
- Output — the artifacts you export and share, clearly separated from input.
Three levels is enough. The names carry the meaning; the depth does not. If a new source shows up on Thursday, it gets its own folder under sources and re-enters the project the same way the first one did — no restructuring, no archaeology.
Mixing images, video, and PDFs
Real case media is rarely one format. A single case might contain screenshots alongside a half-hour recording of a screen, and a report in between. Treat the format as a property of the file, not as a reason to split the case across tools or projects — one project should hold all of it.
DawaImg reads the formats cases actually arrive in:
- Images: .webp .bmp .png .jpg .jpeg .tif .tiff
- Video: .mov .mp4 .avi .wmv .ts
- Documents: .pdf
Because faces are extracted from every supported type into the same project, comparisons can cross it all — the face in frame 200 of the .mov, the one on page 3 of the PDF, and the one in the screenshot — and each one still traces back to the exact file it came from. That mixability, inside a single structured project, is the point.