Camera roll
Also known as: phone gallery, photo library
The single chronological stream a phone keeps every photo and video in, sorted by when it was captured rather than by what it is.
Updated
What it means
A camera roll behaves as a timeline rather than as a filing system. Everything a phone records drops into one undivided stream, and the only organisation is the order it arrived in.
That works until the volume stops being small. A few hundred items is browsable and twenty thousand of them is not, which is the point at which a Media library becomes necessary.
It is also where most action footage now arrives. Clips copied from a camera onto a phone land here alongside everything else, mixed in with screenshots and photographs of parking signs and receipts.
How it works in practice
Pulling the session out of it is the first step. Selecting a day and copying it somewhere deliberate separates the footage from the stream before anything else gets attempted.
Albums help considerably more than they look like they are going to. A per-session album takes a minute to make, and it turns a search through thousands of items into opening one album instead.
Original quality is worth checking before anything else. Phones keep reduced versions locally and leave the full file in the cloud, so copying an Original file sometimes means downloading the full version first.
What to watch out for
Deleting from it deletes from everywhere. A synchronised library removes the item from every device at once, and the recently deleted folder is the only thing standing between a mistake and a permanent loss.
Editing in place is destructive in a subtle way. Phone editors frequently overwrite the original rather than working in a Non-destructive editing way, which removes the version a proper edit actually needed.
It is not a backup. One synchronised library on three devices is one copy of everything, which is the gap a Footage backup exists to fill.
How RawClip handles it
Uploading from a phone gallery works the same way as uploading from a card, provided the full-quality version is on the device rather than only in the cloud. Selecting one session rather than a whole date range is what keeps the analysis on the footage that actually matters.