Sources and folders

Add a folder, watch its contents, exclude what you don't want, and clean up offline drives

A source is a folder ReelChest watches. One folder per source, subfolders included. Files you drop in later just appear; files you delete just leave. No imports, no copies, no proxies parked somewhere mysterious.

Add a source

At the top of the sidebar there's an "Add Source…" row. Click it, point at a folder, hit Open. ReelChest scans every file inside, classifies it as video, image, audio, font, or other, and starts populating the grid as the index grows.

The folder access is captured as a security-scoped bookmark, so the source survives quitting and relaunching. macOS gives us permission to that one folder; we don't poke around outside it.

What gets indexed

Everything in the folder, recursively. With two exceptions:

• Hidden files are skipped by default. If you actually want them, Settings has a File Types toggle to include them.
• macOS metadata folders like .Trash, .fseventsd, and .Spotlight-V100 are always skipped. There's no toggle for that. Nothing useful lives there.

If a source has subfolders you'd rather not index, like a _Renders or Old folder buried inside, open the source's Exclusions sheet and add the relative paths. The grid drops them on the next pass.

Offline drives

If the drive holding a source unmounts, or you move the folder, the assets show as offline. They don't disappear, the index keeps the metadata, but anything that needs the actual file (preview, transcribe, export) waits until the drive comes back. Plug it back in and the source picks up where it was.

If you're done with a source for good, remove it. That clears all of its assets out of the app's index. Removing a source doesn't touch the files on disk, only ReelChest's record of them.

Auto-rescan

By default, sources only re-scan when you ask. If files in a source folder change without ReelChest seeing them (you've been moving things around in Finder), the index can drift. Settings → Library has an "Auto-rescan" cadence: off (default), daily, or weekly. The daily setting is enough for most people; weekly is gentler on big archives. The rescan walks every source and reconciles changes in the background.

If you'd rather force one immediately, right-click a source and pick Rescan.

A working tip

Keep one source per real-world location. One per drive, one per shoot folder, one per archive. Mixing locations into one source makes the offline state harder to read.

Final Cut Pro libraries

Folders aren't the only thing you can browse. ReelChest can also pull in a Final Cut Pro library and let you curate it side by side with raw footage. The flow is different from adding a folder (and the entry point is different too). The next article walks through it.