What it picks up.
Every frame Nikon writes to the card — stills, clips, the sidecar files that travel with them. SyncShot reads the card once and copies what it finds, regardless of body or format.
- RAW files
- NEF from every era of Nikon body, NEF-HE high-efficiency variants from the newer Z generation. Pulled at full resolution, as the camera wrote them.
- Compressed
- JPEG and HEIF at every quality setting. Whatever the body produced sits on the card; whatever sits on the card lands at the destination.
- Video
- N-RAW from the Z9 and its siblings, ProRes from the cinema-capable bodies, H.264 and H.265 the rest of the time. Long takes copy in a single pass.
- Metadata
- Timestamps, lens data, picture-control tags, the technical EXIF the camera embedded. Preserved as the file moves from card to destination.
Where it sends.
One source, many destinations — and SyncShotreads the card once, then fans the same files out to every place you chose. Pick one. Pick five. The card doesn't spin up again for each one.
- Internal disk
- Your Mac's own drive. The fastest target — usually first in the chain so the slower destinations can feed from it in the background.
- External drives
- USB-C and Thunderbolt SSDs, spinning HDDs, anything macOS mounts. Multiple drives at once if your shoot demands it.
- Network storage
- Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, plain SMB shares. SyncShot writes over the network without blocking the local copy or slowing the card read.
- Cloud
- S3 and S3-compatible buckets (Wasabi, R2, MinIO), Google Drive, Dropbox, Azure Blob. Same job, different destination — uploaded in parallel.
How it works.
- 01
Mount the card
Card into the reader, or the body connected over USB. SyncShot sees the source the moment macOS does — no driver, no companion app.
- 02
Choose destinations
Pick every place this shoot belongs. Save the set as a workflow if you'll use it again — next time it's one click.
- 03
Hit start
SyncShot reads the card once and writes to every destination in parallel. The fastest disk finishes first; cloud uploads keep going in the background.
- 04
Trust the report
Every byte is hash-checked end to end. When the job finishes you get a report — what was copied, where it landed, every verification mark. The byte that left the card is the byte that arrived.
Nikon, up close.
Z9 and Z8 anchor the current line, with Z6 III and Z7 II behind them; D850, D780, and D5 still turn up on plenty of assignments, and the Z fc rides in the messenger bag. Stills come out as NEF (compressed or lossless), HEIF, or JPEG. Video sits on N-RAW, ProRes RAW HQ (Z9 and Z8 on firmware 3.00 or later), and H.265 10-bit for everything else.
The quirk that catches people: N-RAW writes only to CFexpress Type-B. Drop an SD into slot two and the camera silently downgrades it to H.265 — SyncShot flags the slot mismatch in the report so you know which clip is the master. Tip: set slot two to Backup in-camera and SyncShot verifies the SD copy against the CFexpress copy on offload. Belt and suspenders, no extra job.
Common questions.
- 01
Does SyncShot work with every Nikon camera?
If the card or the camera shows up in macOS — Image Capture, Finder, a card reader — SyncShot reads it. Z-series mirrorless, the cinema-capable bodies, the long DSLR lineage. No driver, no companion app.
- 02
Can it copy to my external drive and my NAS at the same time?
Yes. Pick as many destinations as you want — internal disk, external SSD, NAS, S3-compatible bucket, Google Drive — and SyncShot reads the card once and feeds every destination in parallel.
- 03
What happens to the card after a copy?
By default the card is read-only — SyncShot is built to copy, not move. Formatting is something you do in-camera when you're ready, never something the offload tool decides for you.
- 04
How do I know the copy is intact?
Every copy is hash-verified end to end. If a destination wrote something other than what the card handed over, SyncShot flags it and retries — and the job report tells you exactly what landed where.
- 05
Does N-RAW to CFexpress and H.265 to SD land cleanly?
Yes. Nikon writes N-RAW only to the CFexpress Type-B slot; with an SD in slot two the camera falls back to H.265 there automatically. SyncShot copies both slots as separate sources in one job and flags the mismatch in the report, so you know which clips are the raw masters and which are the compressed twins — no guessing back at the edit bay when someone asks for the ProRes.
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