What it picks up.
Every frame Pentax writes to the card — stills, the clips from the bodies that record, the sidecars alongside. SyncShot reads the card once and copies what it finds, regardless of body or format.
- RAW files
- PEF native to Pentax, plus the DNG option the brand has long offered. Pulled at full resolution, including the larger 645 frames.
- Compressed
- JPEG at every quality setting. Whatever the body produced sits on the card; whatever sits on the card lands at the destination.
- Video
- H.264 and the modes the K-1 and K-3 lines record. Sidecar audio copies alongside. Long takes copy in a single pass with progress you can watch.
- Metadata
- Timestamps, lens data, custom-image 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.
Pentax specifics.
K-3 Mark III leads the APS-C line; K-1 Mark II covers full-frame; KP still turns up for the enthusiast crowd, and the K-3 Mark III Monochrome writes single-channel DNG for the black-and-white purists. Pentax offers PEF and DNG raw as a user-selectable option — set it once and the camera writes native DNG for every editor to read directly, no proprietary conversion in between.
The K-1 Mark II's USB port is micro-USB, not USB-C, so in-body offload is slow enough to be uncomfortable. Pull the SD and use a UHS-II reader instead. Tip: the K-3 III Monochrome single-channel DNG confuses some editors on import — SyncShot copies byte-for-byte with BLAKE3 verification, so the file that landed is exactly what left the card, editor-guessing aside.
Common questions.
- 01
Does SyncShot work with every Pentax camera?
If the card or the camera shows up in macOS — Image Capture, Finder, a card reader — SyncShot reads it. K-1 and K-3 DSLRs, the 645 medium-format line, the older bodies too. 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 the K-3 III Monochrome single-channel DNG copy correctly?
Yes. The K-3 III Monochrome writes a single-channel DNG that some editors misread as a small or corrupted file — the header looks unusual because there's no colour plane data. SyncShot copies byte-for-byte with BLAKE3 verification, so what left the card is what arrives at every destination, regardless of what any editor guesses about the file size on the way in.
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