Media offline.
Which drive is it on?

What the program knows, and what it does not

DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro and Lightroom all store the full path of every file they use. When a drive is not connected, they know exactly which path is unreachable — and that is where their knowledge ends.

They cannot tell you which physical drive that path belonged to, because they never knew. To them a clip lives at E:\FOOTAGE\Antonini\…, and E: is whatever was plugged into that port the day you imported it. Today it might be a different drive entirely.

So the program asks you to find the media, and you are back at the drawer.

The same question, answered in advance

NanoTracker reads the project — without opening it — takes the paths it contains, and matches them against the catalogue of your drives. The answer is a list of drives, each with where it is right now.

Three drives, one of which you were about to look for on the shelf.

You know what to fetch before you start looking. And if one of them is in a colleague's machine, you ask instead of hunting.

Why it is fast

Because it does not ask the editing program. It reads the project file itself, which is a database sitting on your disk.

Asking DaVinci Resolve

several seconds per projectand Resolve has to be open

Reading the project file

about a hundredth of a secondand nothing has to be running

The difference is not a detail of engineering: it is what makes it usable at all. Listing every project you own becomes a few seconds instead of an afternoon, so you can ask the question casually — before starting a job, not after discovering it is broken.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not relink the media for you. That is a choice, not a missing feature, and it is worth saying out loud.

Relinking means writing inside a working catalogue — a Lightroom .lrcat is a photographer's entire history, and a Resolve project is the job you are being paid for. It is technically possible. It is also the kind of operation where a mistake is discovered weeks later, on somebody else's machine, with no way back.

So NanoTracker stops one step earlier, and gives you the two things you actually need: which drive to plug in, and the exact path to point the program at. The relink you do yourself, in your own program, watching it happen.

A tool that offers to do everything is easy to sell and hard to trust. We would rather tell you where the media is and let you do the part that touches your work.

The awkward case: the folder moved

Sooner or later you reorganise. The catalogue keeps pointing at the old path, and the media is somewhere else on the same drive — or on another one entirely.

What most tools say	What NanoTracker says
“Unknown”	“This path no longer exists” — and it names the path. Knowing that the folders were moved, rather than lost, is most of the answer.
Nothing more	You can ask it to go and look: it searches the whole catalogue for folders with that name and gives you the new path, ready to copy into the relink dialog.

That search reads the entire catalogue, so it takes several seconds rather than being instant — which is exactly why it sits behind a button instead of running on every project, and why it tells you what it is doing while it works.

Common questions

Which programs does it read?

DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Lightroom Classic. It finds their projects and catalogues on your machine by itself, and reads them where they sit.

Does it have to open the project to do this?

No, and that is the whole point. It reads the project file directly, so your editing program does not need to be running and nothing is locked or modified. Asking Resolve itself takes several seconds per project and needs Resolve open; reading the file takes a hundredth of a second and needs nothing.

Does it relink the media for me?

No, deliberately. Relinking means writing inside your working catalogue or project, and a mistake there is expensive in a way that is hard to undo. NanoTracker tells you which drive to plug in and the exact path to point at; the relink you do in your own program, where you can see what is happening.

What if I moved the folder after creating the catalogue?

Then the catalogue still points at the old path, and most tools just say unknown. NanoTracker says something more useful: this path no longer exists, and names it. You can then ask it to search the whole catalogue for where those folders went, and it gives you the new path to copy.

Does it work with projects on drives that are not plugged in?

The project file itself has to be readable, so it lives on a drive you have. The media does not: the answer about where the media lives comes from the catalogue, which remembers drives that are switched off in a drawer.

Does it change anything in my projects?

No. It reads. It never writes to a project, a catalogue or a media drive.