Drives

Drives represent the physical storage locations where your media files live — SD cards, external SSDs, NAS volumes, or local folders.

Indexing a Drive

Go to the Drives page and click Index Drive to open a folder picker. Select a folder and Clipthesis will:

1. Register it as a drive (using the volume UUID for removable drives, or the path for local folders)
2. Recursively scan for media files (videos, photos, RAW photos, and audio)
3. For each file: calculate a content hash, extract metadata, and generate thumbnails
4. Report progress in a modal showing the current file and overall count

If a file's hash already exists in your library (from a previous import or index), Clipthesis adds a new location record instead of creating a duplicate media entry.

Automatic Updates (Watched Drives)

Once a drive is indexed, Clipthesis watches it for filesystem changes and keeps the library in sync automatically — no reindex click needed. Copy footage onto a watched drive and it appears in the Library within a few seconds; delete a file and its location is removed.

• On by default. Every drive has an Auto-update toggle on its card; new and existing drives start with it on. Turn it off for drives you'd rather update manually.
• Silent. Automatic rescans run in the background with no progress modal and no navigation — the Library and drive cards simply refresh when something changed.
• Debounced. Changes are batched: the rescan starts a couple of seconds after disk activity settles, so a large copy triggers one scan, not hundreds.
• Files still copying are deferred. A file modified moments ago is assumed to still be transferring and is skipped, then picked up automatically once it settles — so half-copied files never enter the library.
• Catch-up on connect. When a watched drive reconnects (or the app launches, or you flip the toggle on), Clipthesis runs a catch-up scan to pick up anything that changed while it wasn't watching.
• Network mounts. Some network volumes don't emit file events. Watched drives are also rescanned periodically (every 15 minutes) as a fallback, so changes on those mounts still land — just less immediately.

Rescans are cheap: files already in the library are verified by size without re-hashing, so a no-change rescan of a large drive is close to free.

Location History

When a scan finds that a file has vanished from a drive — you moved footage to another drive in Finder, reorganized folders, or deleted it — Clipthesis doesn't forget where it was. The old location is kept as history: it disappears from the clip's active Locations, drive filters, and clip counts, but remains on record.

This matters most for moved footage. Old editing projects (a DaVinci Resolve timeline from last year, say) reference clips by their absolute paths at the time. When those paths die because the footage migrated to an archive drive, location history is what lets Clipthesis answer "that path used to be this clip — and here's where it lives now."

• Where to see it. Open a clip's detail view. Clips that have ever moved or lost a location show a collapsible Location history section beneath their Locations, listing each removed path with its drive and removal date. Clips with no history don't show the section.
• Searchable from the CLI. clipthesis media history <id> lists every location a clip has had, and clipthesis media locate <path> resolves an old absolute path to the clip and its current locations — see the CLI reference.
• A file that returns is recognized. If a file reappears at a path it previously vanished from, the historical entry is restored to an active location — no duplicate records.
• Synced. Location history syncs with the rest of your library, so a move recorded on one machine is visible on your others.

One limitation: removing a drive erases its history. The Remove action deletes the drive record and every location on it, historical entries included. History also only covers what was known at the time — locations deleted by versions of Clipthesis before location history existed are recovered from the cloud where possible, but a library that never synced can't recover them.

Media Type Categories

Each drive has a set of media type toggles controlling which kinds of files are picked up when it is indexed:

Category	Extensions
Video	.mov, .mp4, .m4v
Photo	.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .heic, .webp, .tiff, .tif, .bmp, .gif, .svg, .avif, .psd, .dpx
Raw	.raw, .arw, .cr2, .cr3, .nef, .dng, .orf, .rw2, .pef, .sr2, .raf
Audio	.wav, .mp3, .m4a, .aac, .flac, .aiff, .aif, .ogg, .opus

All categories are enabled by default on new drives. Toggle a category off on a drive's card if you don't want that kind of file in your library — for example, disable Photo on a drive holding thousands of DPX film-scan frames, since each frame would otherwise be indexed as its own item. Changes take effect on the next reindex.

Ignored Folders

Editing apps litter working drives with render caches and auto-backups that aren't your assets. During a scan, Clipthesis skips folders with these names (matched case-insensitively, at any depth):

• CacheClip, Resolve Project Backups (DaVinci Resolve)
• Media Cache, Media Cache Files, Peak Files, Adobe Premiere Pro Auto-Save (Adobe)
• Render Files, Audio Render Files (Final Cut Pro)

This keeps things like DaVinci's proxy WAVs out of your library. Note that a folder you named exactly one of these yourself would also be skipped — rename it if you need its contents indexed.

Connection Status

Each drive card shows a connection indicator:

• Green dot — connected and accessible
• Grey dot — disconnected (drive unmounted or unavailable)

Clipthesis checks connection status automatically and updates it when you navigate to the Drives page. You can also manually refresh with the Check Connections action.

When a drive is disconnected, clips that only exist on that drive will show as unavailable for playback.

Working Drives

You can mark one or more drives as a Working Drive. Working drives are highlighted with a yellow badge and enable:

• Quick Copy — copy clips from archive/camera drives to your working drive with a single action
• Identifying which clips are ready for editing on your local machine

This is useful when you want to pull clips off slow archive storage onto a fast SSD for editing.

Drive Operations

Action	Description
Rename	Change the display name of a drive
Reindex	Scan the drive again on demand — useful after changing media type categories, or on drives with Auto-update turned off
Auto-update	Toggle automatic re-indexing when files change on disk (see Automatic Updates)
Remove	Delete the drive record and any media that only existed on that drive (cascades to tags, thumbnails, and scrub frames)

Drive Stats

Each drive card displays:

• Number of clips on the drive
• Last indexed date
• Connection status

The Drives page header shows total and connected drive counts.

How Drives Relate to Imports

When you import files, Clipthesis checks if the destination path falls within an indexed drive. If it does, location records are automatically created linking the imported media to that drive. If the destination isn't part of any indexed drive, the files are copied but won't have drive location records until you index the destination folder.