DriveShelf - A Filmmaker's Mac App for Finding Footage on Unplugged Drives

DriveShelf - A Filmmaker's Mac App for Finding Footage on Unplugged Drives

Brie Clayton October 6, 2026

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DriveShelf for Mac catalogs every external drive you own into a Finder-style app, so you can navigate across all files without drives being plugged in.

Built by a working filmmaker, the app catalogs each drive once, then searches the whole archive and finds duplicate files across drives. An iPhone companion app, included in the same purchase, puts the same catalog in your pocket, so you can check your files on the go.

DriveShelf, a Mac app built by filmmaker Sergiy Pudich, remembers what's on every external drive you own. Connect a drive once and DriveShelf saves its file names, folders, sizes and dates to a catalog on your Mac. After that, one search covers every cataloged drive, plugged in or sitting on a shelf, and shows which physical drive has the file. DriveShelf is available on the Mac App Store for $14.99 ( 17.99) as a one-time purchase, and since September it comes with an iPhone companion app, included in the same purchase, that carries the same catalog on your phone.

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Anyone who shoots or edits for a living ends up with a shelf of drives. When a client asks for footage from a job two years ago, finding it usually means plugging in drive after drive, because Finder only searches what's connected. Spreadsheets help until someone forgets to update them, and let's be honest - it's a horrible way to keep track of your data.

After my drive count passed ten, I started cataloging files in an Excel sheet, and it was a disaster, says Pudich. I'd forget to update it, lose time just finding the file, and it only tracked folders, not the files inside them. Within two years it was useless. DriveShelf is the app I'd been dreaming about my whole career.

How it works Catalog once. When you connect a new drive, DriveShelf offers to add it. The scan reads file names, folder paths, sizes, and creation and modification dates into a local database. It never copies, moves or changes the files on the drive.

Search everything. A search runs across all cataloged drives at once, connected or not, with filters for file type, size and drive.

Find duplicates across drives. The duplicate finder lists files that have the same name and size on more than one drive, with a minimum size to skip small files. It doesn't delete anything. It shows where each copy lives, and it can open a copy's folder in its own window to compare two folders side by side.

Organize the shelf. Group drives by client, project or year. The sidebar shows each drive's free space, and a built-in speed test measures how fast it reads.

Check the shelf on the go. The iPhone companion app carries the same catalog on your phone, synced through your own iCloud account. You can check which drive holds a file without going back to the Mac. It's part of the same purchase, not a second one.

Keep the catalog. Renaming a drive in Finder doesn't break its link to the catalog. File Export Catalog saves a complete copy, and Import Catalog restores it.

What it doesn't do DriveShelf isn't a backup tool. It doesn't copy files, and it can't recover a drive that has failed. It's made for physical media: external SSDs and hard drives. Network drives (NAS) aren't officially supported yet. The catalog is stored on your Mac, and it only leaves it if you turn on iPhone sync, which goes through your own iCloud account.

Now I plug a drive in once, put it back on the shelf, and I can still search it from my desk. How cool is that? I built it for my own shelf first. I'm happy to share it with other filmmakers, so no one has to keep an Excel sheet for this anymore, Pudich says.

Price and availability DriveShelf is available on the Mac App Store for $14.99 ( 17.99). It's a one-time purchase with no subscription, and there's no limit on the number of drives. The Mac app requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later and runs on Apple silicon and Intel Macs. The iPhone companion app arrived in September and is included in the same purchase: buy DriveShelf once, and it works on both, with the catalog synced through your own iCloud account.

DriveShelf: https://easyfilm.io/driveshelf/

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/driveshelf/id6772950141

Video, I Got So Tired of Losing Footage That I Built My Own App (1.5 min): https://youtu.be/hADIO6eet-Y

About Sergiy Pudich and EasyFilm Sergiy Pudich is a Bangkok-based director and filmmaker who has worked full-time in the film industry since 2012. He runs EasyLiving Films (www.easyliving.film), a video production studio that makes commercials, documentaries, fiction, and corporate films across Southeast Asia.

DriveShelf was the first app he built. Since then, he's built more for problems he runs into on set and in the edit, each sold once, with no subscription, and collected at easyfilm.io:

CacheCut (Mac, $4.99) finds the cache DaVinci Resolve, Adobe apps, and Final Cut Pro leave on your system drive and moves it to the Trash.

EasyStills (Mac, $6.99) picks the sharpest frame of every shot in a finished video and stacks your picks into Instagram post and Reel sizes, as stills or looping motion.

EasyShrink (Mac, $4.99) turns a video or image into web-ready files: a compressed MP4, a poster frame, an AVIF image set, and the HTML to paste.

EasyGear (iPhone, $4.99) keeps your gear, pack and wrap lists in one place

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