Your first scan

From an empty window to a grid of results. Nothing here has to be set up first — a folder is all AssetScout needs.

Give it a folder

There are three ways, and they do the same thing:

• Drag a folder onto the window from the Finder. A large arrow appears while the folder is over it. Several folders dropped together are scanned into one list.
• Use the scan button — the folder with a plus sign, at the right of the titlebar — and choose Choose Directory….
• Press ⌘O, or use File > Open…, which opens the same panel.

Start with something small the first time — a Downloads folder, or one old backup — rather than your whole home directory. A large scan is worth doing, but it is worth doing once you know what you are looking at.

Watch it fill

The scan control turns into a progress bar with a stop button beside it, and results begin to arrive before the scan has finished. You do not have to wait: you can select, inspect and delete files while it is still working, and stop it whenever you have seen enough.

What the bar means changes halfway through, because a scan has two steps. Following and stopping a scan explains both.

Read the grid

Items are divided into months, newest month first, and each heading counts what is under it. The date written under a thumbnail is the date that month was built from — which, for a photograph or a video, is the moment it was taken and not the day the file was copied.

Look inside something

Click a thumbnail. The panel on the right fills with what is written inside that file: for a photograph, the camera settings and a map of where it was taken; for a video, the codec and the duration; for a document, the page count and who made it.

⌥⌘I shows and hides that panel. Space opens Quick Look, which is also how you play a video or a sound file without leaving AssetScout.

Narrow it down

Two controls in the titlebar, and they work together. The filter — the button with three lines — switches whole kinds of file out of the window. The magnifying glass, or ⌘F, filters by file name as you type.

Scan something else

A new scan replaces what is in the window, so the app asks first. Once you are scanning one folder after another and the question is in the way, switch it off in Settings.