What it picks up.
Whatever the card holds — SyncShot reads it as a volume, not as a brand. The camera that wrote it doesn't need a driver here; the filesystem is the contract. Every file macOS sees, SyncShot can copy.
- Whatever's on the card
- SyncShot reads the card as a mounted volume and copies every file the filesystem exposes — regardless of camera brand, codec, container, or format.
- Folder structure
- Preserved as-is — DCIM/100CANON, MISC/, PRIVATE/, the lot — or remapped via workflow path templates if your archive wants a different shape.
- Hidden files
- System files, AVCHD streams, Sony XAVC sidecars, anything the camera tucks away — included if present, copied alongside the obvious ones.
- Metadata
- Every file's modification time, EXIF, sidecar XMP — preserved end to end 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 get read 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
Slot it in a reader — single or multi-slot. SyncShot sees the card the moment macOS does. Multiple cards at once if your reader has the slots for it.
- 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 each 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.
Cards, in the reader.
The card matters less than the reader. SyncShot doesn't parse card contents — it walks the filesystem — so whatever the camera wrote at whatever codec arrives byte-for-byte, in the folder structure the body created. What breaks the offload isn't the card, it's a slow or thermally throttled reader. UHS-II SD tops out around 300 MB/s in theory and 250 MB/s sustained; CFexpress Type-B ranges wildly by vendor, with Angelbird and ProGrade CFX2 the reliable picks. Cheap USB-A readers are almost never UHS-II regardless of the label.
One quirk worth planning for on multi-card shoots: plug every reader in before you launch SyncShot, not after. Parallel destination writes benefit from parallel source reads, and the app fans reads across every mounted card in one job — so the fastest card finishes and its data starts landing on drives while the slower ones are still handing bytes over. Start with three cards mounted, hit go once, every destination fills in parallel.
Common questions.
- 01
Does it work with CFexpress and CFast?
Yes — anything the Mac mounts as a volume. SD, SDXC, CFexpress Type A and Type B, CFast 2.0, microSD in an adapter. SyncShot doesn't care about the card format, only that macOS sees it.
- 02
Can I read two cards at once?
Yes. Drop each card into a reader — or a multi-slot reader — and list each as a source. SyncShot reads them in parallel and writes to every destination at once.
- 03
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 each card once and feeds every destination in parallel.
- 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
Which CFexpress readers keep up on a busy shoot?
The reader is the bottleneck on CFexpress Type-B, not the card. Angelbird and ProGrade CFX2 units sustain their advertised throughput; plenty of cheap USB-C readers claim CFexpress speeds and thermal-throttle after a few hundred gigabytes. For SD, UHS-II caps around 300 MB/s in theory and closer to 250 MB/s sustained — a cheap USB-A reader almost never delivers UHS-II. Match the reader to the card, plug straight into the Mac, and SyncShot fans the reads out to every destination in parallel.
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