Pond5 Filename Sanitizer

Pond5 keeps fewer characters than it accepts

Pond5’s upload accepts a file of almost any name and any length: it uploads and ingests without complaint. The problem shows up later. Measured across every item of a real catalogue export (several thousand clips), not one stored file name exceeded 80 characters, and Pond5’s metadata import (Apply CSV) is keyed on that exact stored name. A file uploaded under a longer name still lands on the account, but nothing can match it by name afterwards: it sits there holding only whatever metadata was embedded directly in the file, and a later CSV pass never touches it.

This tool cuts the stem to 76 characters, at a word boundary rather than mid-word, which leaves room for a four-character extension like ".mp4" or ".mov" inside the 80-character budget Pond5 actually keeps. The cut only happens when it is needed: a short name comes back unchanged.

What the FTP banner actually allows

Pond5’s own FTP banner states the character set directly: letters, digits, spaces, commas, hyphens, periods, "@" and underscores, and nothing else. Everything outside that, accented letters, apostrophes, parentheses, is replaced with a space rather than simply dropped, so words do not run together. Accents are stripped first ("été" becomes "ete"), then whatever is left over is trimmed of leading and trailing spaces, commas, periods and hyphens. If nothing alphanumeric survives the whole title, the tool falls back to the plain word "clip" rather than sending an empty name.

Quick tips

• Keep the parts that identify the clip (species, place, action) in the first 76 characters: those are the ones this tool keeps when it has to cut.
• Avoid parentheses and quote marks in a file name meant for Pond5: they become a bare space, which can turn "(1)" into a lone "1" sitting in the middle of the name.
• If two clips would sanitize to the same name, rename one before uploading: this tool has no way to see what else is already on your account.
• A name that already fits comes back unchanged: run a batch of titles through one at a time to see which ones would actually get cut.