Search

Tusk's search page is a cross-project file finder. Because Tusk maintains a complete index of every file in every project (including files that aren't locally present), search returns matches from your live working projects and from your archived ones with the same query.

What you can search for

• File names and paths: typing ceremony matches 02_ceremony/, ceremony_master.mov,ceremony_audio_v3.wav, etc.
• Project names and descriptions: matches against the project metadata, so a project description with Smith family wedding April 2026 shows up for queries like smith, wedding, or april 2026.
• Tags: a search for hero matches files tagged hero.

Filters

The sidebar on the search page has filters that combine with the text query (logical AND):

• File type: video, photo, raw, audio, project file, document. Tusk classifies by extension.
• Tags: pick one or more. Files must have all selected tags to appear.
• Project: scope the search to one or more specific projects.
• Drive: only files known to be on a specific drive (or set of drives).
• Status: only Synced files, only Not local files, only Partial files, etc.
• Date: filter by file creation date or last-modified date.

Per-result actions

Every search result row has the same per-row actions as the project file table: Restore, Delete local, File info, Show in Finder, Re-check, etc. You don't need to navigate to the project first; do whatever you need directly from search.

How fast it is

Search runs against the local SQLite index, not against your destinations. Even with hundreds of thousands of files across dozens of projects, queries return in milliseconds. The only slow part is loading the per-result thumbnails (when shown), which Tusk does lazily.

Searching for files you don't have locally

This is the killer use case. A year ago you offloaded a shoot to two drives and a B2 bucket, then deleted the local copies. Today a client asks for that one specific file. You search for the file name in Tusk, find it (Tusk still has the index even though the file isn't on your Mac), see exactly which drive and which cloud bucket it lives on, and either restore from the fastest available source or just plug in the right drive and copy what you need.

Search shows the per-destination location for every result. The Used by column tells you which projects own the file; the destination badges show you exactly where each verified copy lives.