Files move. Fictura keeps up.
Never lose track of a file again
Move a drive, rename a folder — Fictura still finds it
Run a sync and Fictura scores candidate matches across your scan directories using filename, folder structure, and capture date, then repairs broken paths for you. You almost never have to manually relink a file again.
Trustworthy repairs, never guesswork
It only touches what it can verify
When a match is ambiguous, sync surfaces it as a conflict for you to resolve by hand instead of guessing — because a tool that "repairs" your library by silently pointing records at the wrong file would be worse than a broken link.
Sync
Files move. Drives get renamed. External storage gets reconnected under a different path. Sync is how Fictura reconciles what it thinks it knows about your library with what's actually true on disk right now — the recovery layer that keeps everything working.
What Sync can do
From the Sync view, choose which operations to run:
- Sync Photos / Videos / Audio — reconcile each media type against disk.
- Fix Photo / Video / Audio Paths — automatically find files that have moved and repair their tracked location (see the 5-phase algorithm below).
- Find RAW — locate RAW originals that may not be linked yet.
- Update EXIF Data — re-read metadata from files, useful after external edits made outside Fictura.
- Generate Media — (re)build thumbnails, previews, and other variants.
- Copy Original Media — optionally copy originals into Fictura's own managed storage (off by default — see Getting Started on why originals stay in place unless you opt in).
- AI-assisted options — update metadata, add to collections, and detect faces (see Faces), if enabled in Settings.
Run Full Sync to apply your selected operations across the whole library at once.
How path repair actually works
When a file's tracked location no longer matches reality, Fictura runs a 5-phase search, scored by confidence, to find where it actually went:
- Fuzzy match against the source path. The original imported-from path's parent directory is fuzzy-matched against your configured scan directories.
- Fuzzy match against the last known local path. Same idea, using the most recent tracked location instead of the original import source.
- Direct filename search. A straightforward search for a file with the same name across all configured scan directories.
- Date-based search. Uses date patterns found in the folder structure itself, cross-checked against the photo's actual EXIF capture date — catches files reorganized into date-named folders (
2026/20260814/) that a filename-only search would miss. - Video-only Scene/Shot/Take walk-back. For video specifically, walks back through Scene/Shot/Take-style directory hierarchies common in video production workflows to find a relocated clip even when the immediate parent folder changed.
Matches with a high enough confidence score are repaired automatically. Anything ambiguous — multiple equally plausible candidates — surfaces as a conflict in the Sync view for you to resolve by hand, so a file is never silently linked to the wrong path.
Maintenance and needs-resync
Beyond a full sync, dedicated sections show:
- Maintenance — housekeeping actions like removing orphaned variant files that no longer correspond to any tracked media in your database.
- Needs Resync — files that failed reconciliation and need attention, each with its own resync action so you can fix problem files individually rather than re-running a full sync across your entire library.
Backups
Regular backups of your library database and media are a normal part of using Sync-heavy workflows. Settings lets you configure a backup location and reminder interval — Fictura never backs up silently in the background, so you decide exactly when a backup actually runs.