A dozen categories should not push the list you came for off the screen
A working actor accumulates media faster than they expect. Two rounds of headshots, production stills from four jobs, a reel, three clips cut from the reel, behind-the-scenes photographs somebody sent you. Categories are what stop that becoming one undifferentiated scroll.
Choosing which category you are looking at
Photos, videos and audio all use the same control: a select at the top of the list. Pick a category, see what is in it. Each option carries the count of what is filed under it, so you can see at a glance that "Headshots" has four things in it and "Production Stills" has sixty.
The alternative, a row of clickable chips, works while you have five categories. On a real library it runs to a dozen or more, wraps onto three lines, and pushes the actual list below the fold. The select holds the same information in one line's worth of space regardless of how many categories you end up with. All three media types now use it, and the toolbar controls line up at one height across the row.
Renaming and deleting
A category name reads as text, with a three-dot menu next to it holding Rename and Delete. That is the same shape a playlist has, so the two behave alike.
Renaming happens in a dialog rather than in an always-live text field sitting in the list. The difference matters more than it sounds: a live field invites accidental edits every time you scroll past it, and gives you no clear moment to confirm.
Deleting a category does not delete what is in it. It untags those items, and they stay in your library. The confirmation names what is about to be untagged and how many, instead of saying "items", because "delete 60 items" and "untag 60 photographs" are very different sentences to read at speed.
How many categories you want
Fewer than the number you can think of. Categories are for your visitors as much as for you, and a visitor faced with eleven options will open one of them and leave. Three or four that clearly mean something is a better portfolio than a dozen that each hold two photographs.
The useful test is whether somebody who does not know your work would understand the difference between two categories from the names alone. "Headshots" and "Production Stills" pass. "2023" and "Recent" do not, and they will not age well either.
Getting the library in first
If your media is scattered across your phone and a cloud drive, importing from Dropbox is faster than uploading one by one, and iPhone photographs upload directly without converting anything first. Once things are in, drag ordering handles the sequence within a category, and captions handle the rest.
The wider case for organizing any of this is in photo categories for actor portfolios, and galleries is what visitors see at the other end.
