The file manager your Mac should have shipped with.

What you are about to erase, verified first.

Emptying a card, a shoot drive or a shared folder is an act of faith. It stops being one when every file was re-read from disk and there is a document saying what was there.

Ingest copies the card to one or two destinations at once, organizes by capture date, by object and filter or by kind, verifies by re-reading, leaves a checksums.sha256 beside the files and only then —if everything came out clean— ejects the card.

The directory report is the other half: paginated PDF, self-contained HTML, text, CSV or JSON, always with its .sha256 beside it. Two runs over an unchanged folder produce a byte-identical file, which is what makes them comparable.

And it certifies exactly what it can certify, printed in the document itself: what was read, when, and with which algorithm. A report that promises more is no use to anyone who has to lean on it.

Four hundred files, one template, and the list before you accept.

A template with the name [N], the extension [E] and a counter with configurable start, step and digits. Search and replace, with regex if you need it. Upper and lower case.

The table below shows current name next to new name as you type. Nothing is touched until you press Rename, and the whole batch undoes in one go.

Forty files, one change, four different operations.

Putting your name and your copyright on a delivery isn't one change, it is four: a photo keeps that in IPTC, a PDF in its dictionary, a RAW in a place that belongs to the manufacturer, and a zip nowhere at all.

The editor sorts it out for you and tells you what it will cost before you press: how many files get rewritten, how many get a sidecar and how many are only tagged. Every field has its own switch, because «I didn't touch the author» and «I want the author empty» can't mean the same thing when forty files are at stake.

• ✓A RAW is never rewritten. Its metadata goes to an .xmp beside it, which is what the rest of the photography software reads. A modified CR3 can stop opening in the manufacturer's own program.
• ✓Tags work on anything —a zip, a folder— because they belong to the file system, not to the format. And they don't rewrite the file.
• ✓What a file can't hold is reported, not dropped in silence.

11Yours

It bends to your habits, not the other way round.

Four things you set up on the first day and never touch again — the ones that turn a good tool into your tool.

My commands. That terminal command you type every day comes to live one click away from your files: in the panel's context menu and in ⌘K. You say what it applies to —files, folders, or the folder you are in— and which extensions, and it only appears when every file you marked fits it. Paths are quoted for you, apostrophes included.

Colour rules. Temporaries dimmed, anything over a gigabyte in amber, whatever you touched today picked out. Five questions rather than a query language, and the first rule that matches paints the row: the order of the list is the priority, and you drag it.

Type and the cursor goes. With the list focused, typing jumps to the file — what Windows has always done and the Finder never quite did. If the row you are already on still matches, it stays put.

Workspaces. Save both paths, their tabs and the mode under a name, and come back to that arrangement when the job comes back.

And cd works both ways. Typing it in the command line moves the panel, instead of launching a child shell that changes folder and dies. Absolute, relative, ~, - and ..; and what does not exist is said out loud.

13The other way to use it

And if you would rather have it all in view.

What you see above, everywhere else on this page, is the app fresh out of the box: the toolbar carries navigation and view only —where am I and how am I looking at it— which is what ForkLift and Transmit keep up there.

Anyone who wants the commands on screen turns on the action bar in Settings: tabs by theme —Home, File, Compress, Image, Document, Network, Tools— and below them the commands in groups, with the modes one click away. The function-key row at the foot turns on the same way, and the Total Commander preset brings it along.

One command surface at a time, and you pick it: either the clear bar above, or this one with everything in front of you. It changes in Settings, and nothing needs restarting.

15Automate

The work that repeats, without opening the app.

Three actions in macOS's Shortcuts app and an AppleScript dictionary. The card empties itself, verifies itself and leaves its manifest while you are busy with something else.

Ingest Card does what the window does —one or two destinations, organise, re-read every copy and leave the checksums.sha256— with nothing open at all. Verify Checksums reads a folder back against its manifest and returns a yes or a no the rest of the shortcut can decide on. Open Folder puts one or two folders in the panels, one per panel.

You can also ask for them out loud: «Ingest a card with OrthodoxMac». The names and the fields are in English, as every scripting interface on this platform is, and deliberately so: a script that changes language with the system is a script that breaks when it moves to another machine.

And the same gate as the app. With the trial over and no licence, an action that writes refuses and says why. Verifying does not: reading is never blocked, because a file you can check nothing about is worse than one you cannot copy.

AppleScript, for anyone who would rather script it: windows, panels, and each one's folder and selection, all readable and settable. The verb that copies is called transfer —copy already belongs to the Standard Suite— and it goes through the same queue, the same conflict dialog and the same history as any copy started by hand.

Recipes, for the work that repeats inside the app. A recipe is a dialog's answers with a name on them: from where, to where, with which filter, with subfolders or without, verifying at the end and leaving a manifest if you want one. Run it from its own window or from ⌘K, and from there it is an ordinary copy: the same plan before it starts, the same questions about conflicts, the same queue and the same line in the history that can undo it. No daemon: it runs when you run it and with the app open, because scheduling it in the background would mean installing something that keeps working when you are not here.

And the terminal, both ways. om installs from the app's own menu as a link in ~/.local/bin — no administrator — and makes the app one more piece of your pipeline: om . opens where you are, om --marks prints what is marked one path per line, and anything that prints paths can come back: rg -l TODO | om --set turns a command's output into a set in the panel, with every verb in the app on top of it. It talks to the app through the same AppleScript dictionary: no socket, no port, nothing running when you are not typing.