What a scan collects

A scan collects files by what they are, not by what they are called. Five groups, a few hundred types, and a starting set chosen so a first scan is not full of noise.

Five groups

Every file AssetScout lists belongs to one of five groups: Image, Movie, Audio, Text and Document. The group decides which icon the thumbnail carries, what the inspector shows, and where the file sits in the filter and in the settings.

A group is not something you can switch on its own. It follows the types listed under it, so switching a group off switches off everything it contains, and a group where only some of its types are on is drawn with a dash instead of a tick.

How a type is decided

The type comes from what macOS declares about the file, not from the file extension. For pictures it is settled even more firmly than that: the app opens the file to read its date anyway, and the image reader says what it actually managed to read the file as. A JPEG saved with a .png extension is listed as a JPEG.

Files whose type nothing could name are left out of the list altogether. On a home folder that is thousands of files, and none of them is a picture, a video or a document — see What a scan leaves out.

The list of types

The set of types the app knows is built from two sources, and it grows:

• Every type macOS itself declares — a few hundred of them, read in the background at launch.
• Every type AssetScout has met on a disk since it was installed.

That is why the File Types pane of the settings can have more rows in it after a scan than it had before: a kind of file nobody on this Mac had seen before now has a name in the list.

What a new scan starts with

New scans list photographs, movies and sound files. Text and Document are known but start switched off, so a first scan of a home folder does not fill the window with configuration files and receipts. Switch either group on in the File Types settings and scan again.

One more type starts switched off on its own: KTX. Those files really are pictures, so the scan can list them, but they are textures belonging to games and 3D scenes and are almost never what someone is looking for among their own photographs.