Blog | Setting Up Your ProPresenter Library for a New Season

33 Tweet

---

If you’ve been running ProPresenter for a while, you probably have a library that has grown organically — songs added whenever they were needed, folders created on the fly, playlists from services that happened months ago still sitting in your workspace. It works, sort of. But a cluttered ProPresenter library is a hidden tax on your team’s efficiency every single week.

Setting up your library intentionally at the start of a new season is one of the highest-return investments a production director can make. It saves time, reduces errors, and makes it far easier to hand off to volunteers. Here’s how to approach it.

Start with a Library Audit

Before you build anything new, take stock of what you have. Open your ProPresenter library and ask:

Are there duplicate song files? (There almost always are — the same song added at different times with slightly different titles.)

Are there outdated playlists or services cluttering your workspace?

Are your song lyrics formatted consistently? Same font, same size, same text placement across your library?

Are there media files (backgrounds, videos, images) in your library that are broken, missing, or no longer in use?

The audit doesn’t need to take more than an hour. The goal is to understand what you’re working with before you start organizing.

Build a Folder Structure That Scales

A good ProPresenter library structure should be logical to anyone on your team — not just the person who built it. Here’s a simple starting framework:

Songs: Organize alphabetically, or by how frequently they’re used (a ‘Core Songs’ folder with your 40–50 most-used songs is extremely useful for quick access).

Series / Seasonal: A folder for the current sermon series, containing any series-specific graphics, bumpers, or custom slides. A folder for each major season (Easter, Christmas, etc.).

Templates: Blank slide templates for announcements, Scripture slides, sermon notes, and lower-thirds. These should be pre-formatted and ready to populate.

Media: Organized by type (backgrounds, countdowns, mini-movies, stills) and ideally by season or theme within those categories.

Archive: Older series and seasonal folders moved here rather than deleted — you may want them later.

Standardize Your Song Templates

One of the biggest time-savers in ProPresenter is having a master song slide template that all your songs conform to. This means: consistent font and size, consistent text positioning, consistent line breaks, and a consistent approach to chord charts if your team uses them.

If your library was built by multiple people over multiple years, you probably have songs formatted in half a dozen different ways. Standardizing these is tedious work — but once it’s done, it pays dividends for years.

ProPresenter’s ‘Reformat’ tool can help you batch-apply formatting to multiple slides at once. It’s worth learning if you haven’t used it.

Set Up Your Stage Display

Your Stage Display (the output your musicians see on confidence monitors) is often neglected compared to the main display. Take time at the start of the season to:

Make sure the Stage Display shows chord information for songs that have it.

Ensure the current slide and next slide are both visible so operators and musicians can anticipate transitions.

Check that the clock and timer functions are working correctly — especially useful for worship sets with a time budget.

If you have multiple stage monitors showing different content (a speaker monitor vs. a worship leader monitor), verify that your Stage Display layouts are configured correctly for each output.

Create a ‘Sunday Readiness’ Checklist

Once your library is organized, the final step is building a pre-service checklist that any operator can run through before Sunday. This should include: confirming all media files are present and playable, checking that the correct playlist is loaded, verifying Stage Display outputs are active, confirming that lyric slide formatting looks correct on the main screen, and running through any custom slides for announcements or sermon notes.

A two-page printed checklist may feel low-tech — but it’s one of the most reliable ways to prevent errors on Sunday morning, especially when you’re relying on volunteers who may not run your system every week.

Building a well-organized ProPresenter setup isn’t glamorous work. But it’s the kind of foundational investment that makes every Sunday smoother and lets your team focus on leading worship rather than troubleshooting.