Hedge has been updated to make video file management much easier

Hedge, the fast video/audio/image file offloading app, has been upgraded with Presets. Presets may not sound like a big deal, but they actually make life a lot easier, especially when you’re dealing with a lot of identically named memory cards and SSDs.

If you’ve ever used two of the same cameras you’ll know it takes some time to organise your files in different folders, each named with, for example, the camera’s name and date and time of recording. You can, of course, create those folders in advance, but that presumes you know the cameras being used in advance as well. If you don’t have that information, you’ll need to discern by naming folders with a counter or a temporary name that could make things less obvious instead of more.

At the same time, when you’re offloading files, you are probably also offloading a load of them that you really don’t need at all. GoPros, for instance, record data to files that is only relevant if you’re using GoPro’s apps. If you’re not doing that, some files take up space for no reason at all.

Hedge so far lacked a flexible means to create a folder and file naming structure and simultaneously ignore files from the source. Presets change all that. You can create them in the Preferences panel, but they’re really text files living in your Mac’s User Library and with a text editor like BBEdit — and some very basic knowledge of their structure — you can even create them outside of Hedge.

The Preset functionality is very simple. You can ignore files and folders, rename them and create folders and add a Counter per preset. The latter is very useful as it allows you to create different counters for different offload sources such as cameras, audio recorders and disks.

I tested two cameras with the new Hedge capability and found it very robust, not interfering with the offload performance and I was very happy to have the counter-per-preset feature as one of my SD cards didn’t mount properly and I was faced with one counter going up and the other staying foot. I could have reset both of them or enter a new counter value in either one.

Hedge still has the ability to set source and destination folders from the context menu on a per-device basis, but Presets make your life much easier and the offload process faster. Just drag the source to the Sources sidebar, click on the Preset icon and select the one you need.