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DJI Drone File Names Explained: DJI_0001, the Long Date Names, LRF and SRT Files

DJI drones use two naming styles, and the older one will overwrite your footage if you combine cards carelessly. Here is what each part of the name means, what the LRF and SRT files next to every video are, and a folder scheme that keeps several drones and flights apart.

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Open a DJI drone's card and you will find one of two naming styles, plus extra files next to every video. Once you know what each part is, you can decide what to keep and how to stop clips from different cards overwriting each other.

The two naming styles

StyleExampleSeen on
CounterDCIM/100MEDIA/DJI_0023.MP4Older drones, for example the Mini 3 Pro
Date and timeDJI_20231028130043_0002_D.MP4Newer drones, for example the Mini 4 Pro and Mavic 3 Pro

The counter style: DJI_0001

DJI_ followed by a four-digit counter, inside a numbered folder such as 100MEDIA. Photos and videos share the same counter. Mini 3 Pro owners report that after 9,999 files the drone starts again in a new folder, so the same names come round again.

The date and time style

Take DJI_20231028130043_0002_D.MP4 apart:

  • 20231028: the date, 28 October 2023.
  • 130043: the time, 13:00:43, from the drone's clock. That is local time, the moment the photo was taken or the recording started.
  • 0002: a counter. DJI support has said it starts again at 0001 after you format the card or internal storage.
  • D: the camera. DJI support describes D as the visual camera. On the Mavic 3 Pro, owners report every file gets D whichever of its three cameras took it. Enterprise drones use other letters, for example W for wide and Z for zoom on a Matrice.

A photo shot in RAW plus JPEG gives two files with the same name: ..._D.DNG and ..._D.JPG.

The files next to every video: LRF and SRT

.LRF: the low-resolution copy

An LRF file is a small, low-resolution version of the clip, used for previews. It is not needed for editing the full-quality video. Once the MP4 is safely copied and verified, you can delete the LRF files unless you want them as lightweight proxies.

.SRT: the flight log for that clip

An SRT file is a subtitle file, but what it holds is telemetry: one entry per frame with the time, camera settings and position. Open it in any text editor. An entry from a Mini 4 Pro looks like this (position changed):

2
00:00:00,033 --> 00:00:00,066
FrameCnt: 2, DiffTime: 33ms
2024-03-20 12:59:17.852
[iso: 400] [shutter: 1/320.0] [fnum: 1.7] [ev: 2.0]
[latitude: 51.501234] [longitude: -0.141234] [rel_alt: 6.500 abs_alt: 38.309]

Keep these. On the Mini 4 Pro, a SANS Internet Storm Center analysis found no GPS position in the MP4's own metadata, so the SRT may be the only record of where a clip was filmed. rel_alt is height above the take-off point.

SRT files are only written when video subtitles are switched on in the DJI Fly camera settings. The fields vary by model.

Why old-style names overwrite each other

Counter-style names are only unique on one card, on one drone, until the counter comes round again. You get duplicates when:

  • you format the card and the counter starts again, depending on the drone and its settings,
  • you fly two drones that both use the counter style,
  • you pass 9,999 files and the drone starts a new folder,
  • you combine footage from several cards into one folder.

What happens next depends on how you copy. Finder and File Explorer stop and ask what to do with the duplicate, and one tired click on Replace, applied to all, deletes the earlier clips. Command-line tools such as cp and rsync overwrite without asking. Either way the older DJI_0001.MP4 is gone, along with its SRT.

To see whether a folder tree already has clashing names (Mac or Linux):

find ~/Footage -type f -name 'DJI_*' -exec basename {} \; | sort | uniq -d

Any name it prints exists in more than one place. Those are the ones a careless merge would overwrite.

The date-and-time style mostly removes this problem, because two files would need the same second and the same counter. It still depends on the drone's clock being right.

A folder scheme that keeps drones and flights apart

The rule that prevents this for every camera: never put files from two cards in the same folder without a level that says where they came from. For drones:

Footage/
  2026/
    2026-10-04_Lake-District/
      MINI3PRO/
        DJI_0412.MP4
        DJI_0412.SRT
      MINI4PRO/
        DJI_20261004101522_0007_D.MP4
        DJI_20261004101522_0007_D.SRT
  • Year, then date and place. The date sorts correctly; the place is what you will search for later.
  • One folder per drone (or per camera) inside each shoot. Short fixed codes, used every time.
  • Copy the card's files as they are into that folder. Do not rename while copying.

If you fly several batteries in one outing and want flights apart, add a level per flight (F01, F02) under the drone folder. For date-style names you can usually see the flight breaks from the gaps in the times.

Optional: put the drone in the file name

Folders protect you until a file is dragged into an editing project or shared on its own. Adding the drone code to the front of the name keeps it unique everywhere, and because the MP4, SRT and LRF get the same prefix, they stay paired. Inside one drone folder, on a Mac:

for f in DJI_*; do mv -n "$f" "MINI3PRO_$f"; done

-n refuses to overwrite anything. On Windows, in PowerShell inside the same folder:

(Get-ChildItem DJI_*) | Rename-Item -NewName { "MINI3PRO_" + $_.Name }

The parentheses make PowerShell list the files before renaming them, so nothing is renamed twice.

Some newer drones offer custom file and folder naming in DJI Fly's storage settings. Owners report it only adds text to DJI's name rather than replacing it, so it does not help much with sorting.

Before you format the card

Copy the whole card, check the copy against the card, and only then format it in the drone. A checksum-verified copy catches a bad reader or a half-finished transfer that a drag and drop will not tell you about.

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