The Fastest Way to Search Across All Your Design Files at Once

Your files are everywhere. Home folder. External SSD. Old backup drive. A USB stick from a client project three years ago that you keep meaning to consolidate. Work laptop, personal Mac.

Every time you need something, you have to remember not just what the file is — but which machine, which drive, which folder it might be on. Then open Finder on each, search each separately, dig through results.

There's a faster way. Here's how to make your entire design library — across every drive, every format — searchable with a single query.

The Fundamental Problem: Your Files Are Siloed

macOS treats each drive as its own world. Spotlight will search across all mounted drives, but it only searches what's indexed, only returns a limited set of results, and gives you almost nothing for the file formats designers actually work in.

More importantly, when a drive is unplugged, it disappears from Spotlight completely. Which means your archive drives — the ones containing years of past client work — are effectively invisible unless they're physically connected.

The result: a search that should take five seconds takes five minutes of plugging in drives, opening Finder windows, guessing at folder names.

How reverscan Builds a Unified Design File Index

reverscan indexes every drive or folder you add to it. Each added location is scanned for supported file types — 25 formats across design, document, and image categories — and the content of those files is extracted and stored in a local SQLite database on your Mac.

Once indexed, a drive's contents are searchable even when the drive is disconnected. The index persists indefinitely. Plugging in a drive and running a sync updates the index; unplugging the drive doesn't erase it.

The result: one search bar that covers everything you've ever indexed, regardless of whether the source drive is currently plugged in.

[SCREENSHOT: reverscan Drives tab showing multiple drives listed — internal Mac, two external drives, one showing "Unplugged" — all indexed]

Setting Up a Unified Search in Three Steps

Step 1 — Add all your drives

Open reverscan and go to the Drives tab.

• Click + Index Entire Computer to add your home folder as "This Mac"

• Click + Index Drive / Folder for each external drive or project folder

Add every location where design files might live. You can add as many drives and folders as you have. Index them while they're connected — once indexed, they're searchable permanently.

Step 2 — Run Deep Scan on each drive

Deep Scan is reverscan's OCR pass. It reads inside PSDs, Affinity files, InDesign files, and XD files — extracting visible text that the normal index pass can't reach. Run it once on each drive from the Drives tab.

For AI, PDF, and Sketch files, Deep Scan isn't necessary — content is extracted during normal indexing. But for a complete, searchable library, run Deep Scan on every drive.

Step 3 — Search everything

Go to the Search tab. Type any keyword — a client name, a project phrase, a product name, a piece of copy, a file format, anything. reverscan searches across all indexed drives simultaneously and returns ranked results.

[SCREENSHOT: reverscan search tab with a query typed in, results showing files from multiple different drives in one unified list]

Try it free → Download reverscan and build your unified design file index today.

What Gets Searched

When you type a query in reverscan, here's what it's searching across all indexed drives simultaneously:

A single search covers all of it.

How Results Are Ranked

reverscan uses BM25 scoring with filename matches weighted 10× higher than content matches. Among equally-scored results, more recently modified files appear first.

In practice this means:

• A file named "thornbury-brand-2024.ai" will outrank a Sketch file that mentions "Thornbury" in a small label

• Among files that all contain a keyword in their content, the most recently modified ones appear higher

Results also show a confidence badge — "Strong match" for high-scoring results, "Possible match" for lower-confidence ones.

Narrowing Results with Filters

When a broad search returns too many results, the filter bar tightens the scope:

File type chips — select Images, Documents, or Design to limit results to that category. Looking for the PSD source specifically? Select Design and your text and image results disappear.

Date chips — Last 7 days, last 30 days, last year. Useful when you know roughly when a file was created or last touched.

Drive selector — appears when you have two or more drives indexed. Select a specific drive to search only within it.

Filters are additive — you can combine file type + date + drive to get very specific.

[SCREENSHOT: reverscan search with filter bar visible — "Design" chip selected and a drive chosen from the dropdown]

Auto-Sync Keeps It Current

A unified index is only useful if it stays current. reverscan syncs on a configurable schedule — every minute, every 30 minutes, every hour, every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly.

When a sync runs, reverscan checks for new files and files whose content has changed on each indexed drive. New files are added to the index. Changed files are re-indexed. Files that have been deleted are removed.

You can configure the sync frequency per drive from the Drives tab. Internal drives that change frequently can sync daily; archive drives that rarely change can sync monthly.

Auto-sync runs even when reverscan's window is closed — it operates as a background menu bar agent. You'll never need to remember to manually trigger an update.

Working with Offline Drives

This is where reverscan's approach differs most from Spotlight.

When an external drive is unplugged, all files indexed from it remain in reverscan's index. A search will still surface those files — they appear in results with an "Unplugged" badge showing which drive they're on. For images, the stored thumbnail preview is shown even without the drive connected.

This makes reverscan genuinely useful for archive drives. Index them once while they're plugged in. After that, they're always searchable — even from inside a drawer.

[SCREENSHOT: search results showing a file with an "Unplugged" badge, indicating which drive it's on]

Frequently Asked Questions

How many drives can I index?
As many as you want on Pro. The free plan covers your home folder ("This Mac") with unlimited files, plus a limited number of external drives and folders earned through referrals.

Does adding more drives slow down search?
No. Search speed is determined by the size of the index (number of files and total content), not the number of drives. A search across 100,000 files indexed from 10 drives takes the same time as a search across 100,000 files from one drive.

What happens to the index if I move files between drives?
Files moved between drives will appear at their old path in the index until the next sync. After a sync on both the source and destination drives, the index updates to reflect the new location. If the source drive no longer contains the file, it's removed from that drive's index entry.

Can I search by file size or file type without a text query?
Not directly — reverscan requires at least a text query to run a search. The filter bar options (file type, date) refine a text search but can't run independently.

Does this work if I have files on both a work Mac and a personal Mac?
reverscan's index lives on one machine. If your files are split across two Macs, you'd need reverscan on each machine, each maintaining its own index. There's no cross-machine sync or shared index.

Every drive you own, every format you work in, every file you've saved — searchable in one place, with one query. Download reverscan free and build your index today.