This is a guest post by Luke Lv, founder of Lumira Studio, a UK video production studio (Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn).
There is a small moment that I think most photographers and filmmakers will recognise. You are on the next shoot, you reach for a card, and realise it is still full from the last job.
Then the doubt starts.
Did I definitely back this up properly? Is everything on both drives? Is it actually safe to format? You probably did everything correctly. But when that card holds a full day of work, “probably” does not always feel good enough.
I started Lumira Studio in 2014, and this was something that bothered me for years. So we eventually built a small tool for our own team to remove that doubt.
It is called Stow, and we decided to make it free. It works on both Mac and Windows.
What Stow does
The idea is deliberately simple.
You choose the camera card, then choose two destination drives. Stow copies the files to both destinations at the same time. Once the copy is complete, it reads the files back from the destination drives and verifies them before giving you a clear result:
Safe to wipe.
Or, if something is not right:
Not yet.
The important part for us was that Stow should not simply tell you that a copy process has finished. We wanted it to check the files that had actually been written to the destination drives before we trusted the result.
Why the verification matters
Most of the time, copying a card is completely uneventful. The problem is that the footage or photographs on that card may be impossible to replace. A wedding, a commercial, an interview, a wildlife trip or an entire production day might only exist once.
That is why I wanted a very simple answer at the end of an offload. I did not want to look through folders and wonder whether everything had made it across. I wanted to know whether the copy had been completed and verified before the card was reused.
Stow also saves a short report to the destination drives showing what was copied and verified. For us, that report is useful because the question often comes later. You pick up the card on another shoot and cannot quite remember what happened to the footage that was on it. Having a record removes some of that uncertainty.
Why we made it free
We originally built Stow for our own production work. We wanted something simple that could copy to two destinations, verify the files afterwards and give our team a clear answer before a card was formatted. Once we had built it, there did not seem to be much reason to keep it to ourselves.
So Stow is free.
There is no account to create, no subscription and no paid tier behind it. It is not intended to replace a proper backup strategy. It is simply a tool to make one very important part of the workflow clearer: getting the files safely off the card and verifying the copies before that card is reused.
One honest note
Stow is not yet code-signed and certified by Microsoft or Apple. That means the first time you open it, your operating system may display a security warning. Getting the app properly signed is one of the next things we are working on. In the meantime, we have put together a short installation guide for both Mac and Windows, you will find it on the website.
Where to get it
Stow is available free at:
https://www.lumirastudio.com/stow/
There is nothing to sign up for. And if you try it and find something that would make it more useful, I would genuinely like to hear about it. A lot of the improvements we are already planning have come directly from photographers and filmmakers telling us what they would like the app to do next.
