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:
- Register it as a drive (using the volume UUID for removable drives, or the path for local folders)
- Recursively scan for media files (videos, photos, RAW photos, and audio)
- For each file: calculate a content hash, extract metadata, and generate thumbnails
- 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.
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 to pick up newly added files |
| 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.