Find the shot. Not the folder.
Scout searches only the drives you point it at, and shows you enough of each result to know it is the right one. Built for editors sitting on years of footage.
$4.99 · one-time · macOS 14 · Apple Silicon
Every one of these exists in the app today.
Scoped search
Search onlythe drives you choose.
Spotlight cannot limit itself to one external volume. Scout starts there — pick your drives once and every result comes from somewhere you actually keep work.
- Price
- $4.99 — one-time
- Requires
- macOS 14 or later
- Chip
- Apple Silicon only
- Where
- Mac App Store
- Size
- Under 20 MB
Speed
Indexed once.Instant after that.
Scout keeps its own index warm, so searching a slow USB drive feels exactly like searching the internal one.
Live mode
No index?Search anyway.
Switch to Live and Scout walks the drives directly. Slower, but nothing to build first — useful the moment you plug in a drive you have never scanned.
Fuzzy matching
Type it wrong.Find it anyway.
Filenames from a decade of projects are rarely typed the way you remember them. Scout tolerates typos and partial words.
Ranking
Best match first.Not filesystem order.
Results are ranked by how well they actually match, so the clip you meant is near the top instead of buried under alphabetical noise.
Sorting
Sort by namewhen you know it.
Straight alphabetical, for when you remember roughly what the file was called and just need it in order.
Sorting
Sort bydate modified.
Find what you touched last week without remembering a single character of the filename.
Sorting
Sort bydate created.
When the shoot date matters more than the edit date — original capture order, not last-saved order.
Sorting
Sort by size,up or down.
Hunt the 40 GB master or sweep the tiny proxies. Ascending and descending, one click apart.
Filters
Video, imageor audio only.
One click narrows the grid to the kind of media you are actually looking for.
Filters
Today, this week,this month, this year.
Date filters that match how editors actually think about footage — recency, not calendar arithmetic.
Filters
Under 100 MB.Over a gigabyte.
Size bands that separate stills and stingers from masters and multicam without typing a byte count.
Preview
Scrub the videowithout opening it.
A filename tells you nothing. Scout plays the clip in place, so you rule it out in two seconds rather than round-tripping through your NLE.
Requires macOS 14 · Apple Silicon
Preview
Volume controlwhere you need it.
Check the audio on a take without hunting for a system slider.
Preview
Skip thirtyseconds at a time.
Jump through a long interview to the part you actually remember.
Preview
See the soundbefore you load it.
Audio files get a real waveform, so you can spot the take with the clean start.
Preview
Stills, full size,instantly.
Images preview at full resolution in the inspector — no Quick Look round trip.
Metadata
Codec, resolution,duration, dates.
The details that decide whether a clip is usable, sitting next to the frame instead of three dialogs away.
Legacy formats
The codecsmacOS forgot.
QuickTime Animation, Cinepak, Sorenson, Indeo. Scout ships its own FFmpeg, so old After Effects renders and archive footage preview when Finder and QuickLook refuse.
Legacy formats
Transcoded once.Cached forever.
The playback proxy is built on demand and kept, so the slow decode is paid a single time per file.
Workflow
Drag straightinto your timeline.
Pull a result out of Scout and drop it into Premiere. No reveal, no navigate, no copy-paste path.
Workflow
Reveal in Finder,one keystroke.
When you do need the file on disk, it is one key away.
Workflow
Never touchthe trackpad.
Arrow through results, space to preview, return to open, escape to clear. Built for people who edit with both hands on the keyboard.
Workflow
Contact sheetor poster size.
Scale the result grid to suit what you are scanning for — dense for filenames, large for faces.
Workflow
Run that searchagain.
Recent searches remember the query and the drives it ran against, so repeating last week's hunt is one click.
$4.99 once. Nothing leaves your Mac. Scout only ever reads — it never moves, renames or deletes a file.
- Price
- $4.99 — one-time
- Requires
- macOS 14 or later
- Chip
- Apple Silicon only
- Where
- Mac App Store
- Size
- Under 20 MB
Questions.
How is this different from Finder or Spotlight?
Spotlight cannot scope itself to a single external volume, and it surfaces system files you do not care about. Scout searches only the drives you pick, and previews every result so you recognise a clip instead of guessing from its filename.
Does it index in the background?
No. Nothing is scanned until you press the button. There is no daemon and nothing runs when Scout is closed.
Does it work on Intel Macs?
No. Scout is Apple Silicon only, deliberately.
Does it move or change my files?
Never. Scout only reads. Nothing on your drives is touched, renamed or moved.
What about codecs macOS cannot play?
Scout ships its own FFmpeg build and transcodes a playback proxy on demand, so QuickTime Animation, Cinepak, Sorenson and Indeo all preview.
Is there a subscription?
No. $4.99 once, yours to keep.
$4.99 · one-time purchaseFound a bug in Scout?
Tell me about it and attach a screenshot. It goes straight to me — there is no support queue and no ticket robot.
Report it