Library Basics

The Library is where you browse, preview, and organise your clips. This page covers the essentials.

Grid Navigation

The media grid shows thumbnails of all your clips. You can navigate it entirely with the keyboard:

Key	Action
Arrow keys	Move selection through the grid
Space	Quick preview the selected clip
Enter	Open the full detail modal
⌘A	Select all visible clips
Esc	Deselect all

Click a clip to select it, or ⌘-click / Shift-click to multi-select.

View Modes

The view switch in the toolbar offers three layouts. Your choice is remembered across sessions and also applies to the Recent page.

• Grid (default) — thumbnail tiles. A second control picks Small, Medium, or Large tiles.
• List — one row per clip with a small thumbnail and columns for name, type, duration, resolution, codec, size, date created, date indexed, drives, and tags.
• Compact — the same columns without thumbnails, so more clips fit on screen.

Selecting, shift-clicking a range, dragging into other apps, and double-clicking to open work the same way in every layout. In the list layouts the ↑ and ↓ keys move through rows.

Sorting

Sort from the toolbar's Sort menu, or in the list layouts by clicking a column header. Clicking the active column reverses the order; clicking a different column switches to it. The sortable fields are:

• Date Indexed (default) — when you imported/indexed the clip
• Date Created — the original recording/creation date from file metadata (falls back to the file's own timestamps when the media carries no embedded date, as is common for audio)
• Filename — alphabetical, ignoring case
• Type — audio, image, video
• Duration
• Resolution — by pixel count, so portrait and landscape clips compare fairly
• File Size

Toggle ascending/descending with the sort direction button, or by clicking the active column header again.

Hover Scrub

Hover over a thumbnail to scrub through preview frames. This gives you a quick sense of the clip's content without opening it.

Detail Modal

Press Enter or double-click a clip to open the detail modal. Here you can:

• Play the video with full transport controls
• See the whole frame — portrait and landscape media both scale to fit the viewer, so tall phone footage is never cropped
• See metadata — codec, resolution, duration, file size, date created
• View and edit tags — add or remove tags from this clip
• See file locations — which drives contain this file and their paths
• See collections — which collections this clip belongs to

Video Player Shortcuts

Key	Action
Space	Play / Pause
K	Pause
J	Decrease playback speed
L	Increase playback speed
←	Skip back 5 seconds
→	Skip forward 5 seconds
Esc	Close modal

Batch Operations

Select multiple clips then:

• Press T to open the tag input — type a tag name and press Enter to apply it to all selected clips
• Press ⌘⇧R to send selected clips to DaVinci Resolve
• Use the toolbar actions for additional batch operations

Filter Sidebar

The left sidebar contains filters for narrowing down what's visible in the grid. See Search & Filters for the full guide.

Next Steps

• Importing — deep dive into the import workflow
• Tags — learn about the tagging system
• Search & Filters — master the filter sidebar