DriveLibrary
DriveLibrary reads your footage drives once and remembers what is on them: every clip and every frame, every word said, every face, and what is inside every project and document. Search all of it with the drives back on the shelf.
In use at RIOT now. One email when it is ready for you, nothing else.
DriveLibrary was made by RIOT, a creative agency in New York. Our own shoots live on 253 drives and four network storage boxes. We wrote tags on the drives in marker, kept a catalogue of file names, and still plugged in drive after drive to find one clip, one line of an interview, one project.
So we built the library we wanted. It reads a drive once and remembers what is inside it, not just what it is called.
Before
With DriveLibrary
See it
Inside every clip
Every clip gets a contact sheet you can open, enlarge and save, long after the drive has gone back in its box. Plug the drive in and the clip plays right there, even the ones macOS cannot: for R3D, BRAW and MXF, DriveLibrary makes a playable copy on your Mac.
What was said
Search a phrase and land on the second it was said in an interview, or the page it was written on in a treatment.
Inside the projects
Its titles, markers and sequences, every clip it uses, and which drive or drives have to be plugged in to open it. Search reads inside projects too, so a marker note or a line of title text takes you straight to the project it is in.
Label it
DriveLibrary suggests the next tag in your series. Write it on the drive, then confirm it by typing the tag back, so nothing is marked by accident. Add the place it lives, like the office or storage unit and its address, and its spot inside, like Locker 3, shelf 2. Its clips and photos stay searchable with the drive unplugged, and you know exactly where to go to get it.
Who is in it
Faces grouped by likeness and named by you, on your Mac. Take out a wrong one with a click.
The shelf
Drives grouped by where they are, and the ones still to label first, so a box of drives gets done in an afternoon.
What it reads
Footage
Words
Projects
Camera
People
Drives
Copies
Kept
Reads
Camera
Projects
Design
Documents
DriveLibrary reads it where it is, and never writes to it, moves or changes a thing on it.
Clips, frames, sound, faces, projects. A big drive takes a while; you can keep working.
It gives the drive its tag, the next in order for its year. Write it on the drive, confirm it, and say where the drive lives.
Everything you need to find it again stays on your Mac. When you need the drive itself, the tag tells you which box.
DriveLibrary runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded: not your footage, not its pictures, not what was said in it, not the faces in it. It reads your drives without changing them, and keeps its own copy safe on the NAS or disk you choose.
That is the point of it. Once a drive has been read, everything DriveLibrary learned stays on your Mac: the pictures, the sound, what was said, who is in it, what is in its projects. Plug the drive in only when you need the file itself.
Yes. DriveLibrary runs on your Mac and sends nothing anywhere: not your footage, not its pictures or transcripts, not the faces in it. We built it for our own client archive, which is full of work under NDA.
No. Transcription and face grouping run on your Mac. There is no account and no cloud, and we never see your library.
No, it is a library of what is on your drives. It does show you which work exists on only one drive, so you know what to back up, and it keeps its own library backed up to a NAS or disk you choose.
Never. It reads a drive where it is and writes nothing to it. It can also read every byte of a drive to check it still reads, without writing a thing.
Yes. Network shares are read like drives and grouped under the NAS they live on, recognised by the box itself, so renaming a share changes nothing.
A Mac with Apple silicon, running macOS 13 Ventura or later.
We will say when it is ready. People on the list hear first.
