How to browse and find footage across multiple external drives on a Mac

If you have been editing for a few years, your footage lives on five, ten or twenty drives. One SSD per project, an old drive you barely plug in, the card you never cleared. Space is not the problem. Finding the shot you know you filmed is. This is the system I use as a video editor and colorist.

1. Give every drive a unique name

A drive called "Untitled" or "SSD" is a lost drive. Give it a short, unique name and write it on a physical label too.

• Type + size + number, for example SSD_4TB_1, SSD_2TB_3.
• Never two drives with the same name: editing apps and backup tools get confused when they reconnect media.

2. The same folder structure on every drive

Which one you pick matters less than using the same one everywhere. One that works:

Client/
  2026-10 Project name/
    Footage/
      Raw/
      Graded/
    Audio/
    Project/
    Render/

• Date first (YYYY-MM) so alphabetical order is chronological order.
• Raw apart from Graded: the original never gets overwritten.
• Do not rename camera files. The original name (C0012.MP4, A001_C003) is what lets you relink a project years later.

3. Copy with verification, not by dragging

Dragging in Finder copies, but it never tells you the copy is identical. For footage you cannot shoot again, copy with verification. In Terminal, rsync copies and resumes if it gets interrupted:

rsync -a --progress "/Volumes/CARD/" "/Volumes/SSD_4TB_1/Client/2026-10 Project/Footage/Raw/"

To compare the original and the copy, check the fingerprint of each file:

shasum -a 256 clip.mov

If both fingerprints match, the copy is identical byte for byte. Only then format the card.

4. Backups, the 3-2-1 rule

• 3 copies of anything important,
• on 2 different media (two drives, or a drive and the cloud),
• 1 outside your home or studio.

5. Browse without opening every folder

This is the step almost nobody solves. To find a shot you plug in drive after drive, open folder after folder, and double click clips one by one. What you can use on a Mac:

• Finder in Gallery view (Cmd+4) with Quick Look (space bar). Free and already there, but it only shows one folder at a time and it does not dig into subfolders.
• Adobe Bridge. Free with an Adobe account, shows video thumbnails and metadata. Good for one drive, heavy for many, and it forgets what it saw when the drive is gone.
• A text list per drive with find /Volumes/SSD_4TB_1 -iname "*.mov" > ssd1.txt. It finds the file name, but you cannot see the shot.
• A footage browser that scans whole drives, keeps thumbnails and lets you search by looking at the images.

What I use

None of the above was enough for me, so I built my own browser, and today I sell it as Footage Viewer. What it does:

• You add a folder or a whole drive and it walks every subfolder looking for video (.mp4 .mov .mxf .r3d .mts and more) and photos (HEIC and DNG included).
• Every clip gets a thumbnail, duration, codec, resolution, date and the camera guessed from the folder.
• Hover over a clip and it scrubs through it, without opening anything.
• Filters by folder, video or photo, duration, year, day, hour, shot type (drone, camera, gimbal, timelapse) and orientation.
• When a drive is unplugged its clips are hidden, but the index and thumbnails stay on your Mac and come back on their own when you reconnect it.
• It finds exact duplicates across drives so you can free space.

It runs on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 12 or later. It is not signed with an Apple developer certificate yet, so the first time macOS blocks it: open System Settings, Privacy and Security, and click Open Anyway.

Summary

1. A unique name for every drive.
2. The same folder structure, date first, Raw kept apart.
3. Verified copies before formatting anything.
4. 3-2-1 backups.
5. A browser or index so you can search without plugging everything in.

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