Bredo / Guides / Finding old footage
How to find footage you shot years ago
Start from the facts you are certain of rather than the ones you are trying to remember. You almost never recall a filename, but you usually know roughly when it was, which camera was in your hand, and whether it was a job or something you shot for yourself. Those three narrow a decade of footage to a handful of days, and a handful of days is small enough to scroll through and recognise the shot on sight.
Use the date as the spine of the search
Every camera stamps a shooting date into the file, and macOS keeps it. Even when you have forgotten the month, you generally remember the season, the weather or what else was happening that year, and that is enough to bracket a range. Finder can search a date range directly: open the folder, press ⌘F, and add a Created date condition.
From Terminal the same thing is one line, which is useful when the footage is spread over a drive with no sensible structure:
find /Volumes/FOOTAGE_03 -type f -name "*.MP4" \
-newermt "2023-06-01" ! -newermt "2023-09-01"Beware one trap: copying files between drives can reset the created date to the day of the copy, which is why the date inside the file matters more than the date on the file system. Tools that read the container, or an app that catalogued the clip when it first arrived, give you the real shooting date rather than the date of a copy made in 2021.
Narrow by the technical facts you do remember
Camera, resolution, frame rate and codec are all recorded in the file and all of them are things you tend to know. "It was the A7 III, so before 2022." "It was slow motion, so 120fps." "It was the trip where I only had the phone." Each of these cuts the pile by a large fraction, and combining two of them usually gets you to one shoot.
This is also where filenames earn their keep, quietly. The camera's own reel and clip numbers run in sequence, so once you have found anything from the right day, the clips either side of it are the rest of that session. Finding one shot from a shoot is usually the whole battle.
Searching for what was said
If the shot you want is someone talking, the words are a better handle than anything else, and they are searchable once the speech has been transcribed. Transcription on a recent Mac runs on the machine itself, so an archive can be put through it without anything being uploaded. It takes time, which is the argument for doing it to old footage on a quiet week rather than on the afternoon a client asks.
The same goes for what is visible in the picture. Software that reads frames can answer "harbour at dusk" without anyone ever having typed the word harbour, which is the only realistic way to search footage nobody had time to label. What it cannot do is invent context that was never recorded, so the name of the person in shot is still something a human has to supply once.
Search that reaches drives on the shelf
Bredo reads the picture and the speech in each clip as it arrives, then answers filters and plain words together. Results tell you what matched, and clips on a drive you have unplugged still turn up, with the drive named.
Make old footage findable before you need it
Every method above is a way of coping with an archive nobody indexed. The cheaper fix is to spend twenty minutes per drive now. Plug each drive in, take a listing of what is on it, and give each shoot folder a name with a place and a subject in it. Do the oldest drive first, because that is the one whose contents you have most thoroughly forgotten.
Add the two words you will actually search for. Not "Interview_Final_v2", but "Bergen harbour Nordal interview". You are writing for a version of yourself who has lost all context, and that person needs nouns. Cataloguing external drives covers how to keep those listings somewhere you can search them all at once.
When you find it, note where it was
Footage you searched hard for will be searched for again. When you find it, write down the drive and the path somewhere durable, or pull the clip into a collection so the next search takes a second. The half hour you just spent is a cost you can pay once or pay every time.
If this hunt happens often, the structural fix is a dated filing system applied to new work from today, so that the pile you cannot search stops growing while you chip away at the old one.
Questions
How do I search old video files when I cannot remember the filename?
Search by the facts the files carry rather than the name. Every clip records a shooting date, a camera model, a resolution and a frame rate, and most record a duration you can guess at. Narrowing by date and camera usually cuts a decade of footage down to an afternoon's worth, which is small enough to look through.
Can I search inside video for something that was said?
Yes, if the speech has been transcribed first. Transcription turns spoken words into text you can search, and on a recent Mac it runs locally without uploading anything. Untranscribed footage can only be searched by its metadata, which is why running transcription over an archive is worth doing before you need it.