What it picks up.
Every frame Sony writes to the card — stills, clips, the sidecar files that come along for the ride. SyncShot reads the card once and copies what it finds, regardless of body or format.
- RAW files
- ARW from every Alpha generation, pulled at full resolution. Single shots, brackets, drive-mode bursts — copied 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
- XAVC S, XAVC HS, XAVC S-I — the long takes from FX bodies and the cinema clips from Alpha hybrids. Sidecar audio and proxy files copy alongside.
- Metadata
- Timestamps, lens data, picture-profile 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.
The Sony specifics.
Alpha 1, A7 IV, A7R V, A7S III on the stills side; FX3, FX6, and FX9 when the shoot goes long. ARW files copy at whatever compression the body wrote — uncompressed, compressed, lossless — with the HEIF or JPEG proxies alongside. Video ranges from XAVC-S to XAVC-HS to XAVC-S-I on the cinema bodies; the low-res proxy files land beside each master clip so your NLE reconnects instantly.
One quirk worth knowing: Sony bodies expose the card as MTP by default, which presents both slots as one folder tree. Switch to Mass Storage under USB Connection and macOS mounts each slot as a separate volume — useful when you want slot-A footage on the NAS and slot-B backups on a local SSD.
Common questions.
- 01
Does SyncShot work with every Sony camera?
If the card or the camera shows up in macOS — Image Capture, Finder, a card reader — SyncShot reads it. Alpha bodies, Cinema Line FX, RX compacts, the older ones 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
Do XAVC-S proxies stay paired with the master clips?
Yes. Sony writes the low-res .MP4 proxy next to each master with the same stem — SyncShot copies them together and preserves the pairing at every destination, so Premiere and Resolve auto-relink both the moment you point at the folder. If you route proxies to a fast local SSD and masters to the NAS, the pairing survives the split.
Also offloading from Canon, Nikon, or Fujifilm? Browse everything SyncShot loves.