AssetScout for macOS
You know when you made it.
Not where you put it.
AssetScout walks a folder — or a whole drive — and lays out every picture, video, recording and document it finds as a grid of thumbnails, in the order the content was made. You look for the file by its date instead of by its folder.
Why
Saved once, and then gone
A photo, a screen recording or a scanned document gets saved somewhere, once. Months later you want it back. You remember roughly when it happened. You do not remember the folder, and searching by name only works if you gave it one.
AssetScout answers the question you can actually answer. Hand it a folder, an old backup, an external disk. It reads everything inside, works out when each file was really made, and puts the whole lot on a timeline.
- Three ways in. Choose a folder from the titlebar, drop folders on the window, or press ⌘O.
- The folders nobody can find. Mail attachments, Messages attachments and the system's live wallpapers are offered by name.
- It remembers. A folder scanned once is still reachable after you quit and start the app again.
What it does
From a folder to a timeline you can read
Three parts, in the order you meet them: a scan you can watch and stop at any time, a window grouped by month, and a panel that changes with whatever you click on.
Results arrive while it is still scanning
The window fills up as the scan works, so you can select, look at and delete files long before it has finished. A progress bar says how far it has got, and the stop button ends it whenever you want — what has been found so far stays in the window.
- It stays out of other apps. Every app on your Mac has a private folder only it may open. The scan walks past all of them. Your own pictures and documents are never in there, and asking to open one leaves a scan waiting forever.
- It skips the copies. Inside a Photos, iPhoto or Aperture library it reads the imported originals and leaves the previews, thumbnails, rendered edits and caches alone.
- It uses the whole machine. The work is spread across as many processor cores as your Mac has.
Grouped by the month it was made, not the month it was copied
For photographs and videos the date comes from the file's own metadata, which is the moment the picture was taken. A picture copied off a camera last week still lands in the month it was taken in. Files that carry no such date are placed by their file dates instead, and those items can be marked, so you can see at a glance where the order is a guess.
A button in the titlebar chooses which date the months are built from: Creation Date, or Last Modified for finding what you worked on recently. The choice changes the groups, the order inside them and the date under each thumbnail together, so all three always say the same thing.
Narrowing down is two controls that work together. The filter switches whole kinds of file off — or individual types, JPEG but not PNG — and counts what it is hiding. ⌘F opens the search field, which filters the whole scan by file name as you type.
One panel, and it changes with the file
Click an item and the panel tells you what the file is, not only what it is called: where it sits, how big it is, when it was made. When the file knows where it was made, a map sits above all that with a marker on the spot. That is often enough to tell one trip from another without opening a single picture.
Below that, the panel follows the kind of file. A photograph reports what the camera was doing at the moment the picture was taken. A video reports how long it runs and how it was encoded. A text file reports how many words are in it. None of this is chosen or switched on: select a file, and the panel is already showing what that kind of file has to say. Select a hundred, and it tells you how much room they take together.
The values are written the way a person says them. An exposure time reads 1/250 s, not 0.004. The metering mode and the flash are sentences, not a code. Nothing is dropped along the way either: a tag the app has never seen still appears under Other, named the way the file names it.
Actions
Finding it is usually not the end of it
Select what you want — click, ⇧-click for a run, ⌘-click for one more, or drag a rectangle over the grid — and every action works on the whole selection.
Select
⌘A takes everything the window lists — what the filter and the search field hide stays out of it. Scrolled away from your selection, ⌘J brings it back into view.
Look, turn, throw away
Space opens Quick Look — which is also how you play a video or a sound file. The bottom four items appear for pictures and videos and are written to the file on disk.
Drag them out
Drop the selection on a folder in the Finder, or on any app that takes files. That moves them, as dragging in the Finder does; hold ⌥ while you drop to copy instead.
Your files
It reads what you hand it, and nothing else
AssetScout is fully sandboxed. It starts with access to nothing at all, and
gains the right to read a folder only when you choose that folder yourself.
Picking ~/Pictures says nothing about ~/Documents.
That permission is kept in a security-scoped bookmark, so a folder scanned once is still readable after a restart and you are not asked for it twice.
There is no account, no sync and no server to talk to. Nothing is uploaded, and no library is built beside your files. Reading a photograph's date does not even decode the picture.
- Rotating and flipping Writes the turned picture back into the file. There is no undo, and no copy is kept.
- Move to Trash Puts the file in the macOS trash, where it stays until you empty it.
- Dragging a thumbnail out Moves the file where you dropped it, or copies it with ⌥ held down.
Those three are the only things that change a file, and each of them is something you chose from a menu.
Documentation
Written down properly
Twenty-two pages covering every control, every setting and every message the app can show — including the parts that are hard to guess, like which date a month is built from and what a scan deliberately walks past.
Read it from the beginning, or go straight to the reference pages for a setting, a shortcut or a message. The same manual is in the app as well, under Help > AssetScout Help, in English, German, Hungarian and Slovak.
For macOS 14.4 and newer
The thumbnail grid stays smooth even with tens of thousands of files in it.
