I’m not sure about you guys, but I love having my old premiere projects, footage and all. I want to open these bad boys up in 5 years and see what decisions I made back then! But throughout my efforts of making sure everything is in one place, I’ve identified a massive issue.
You see, when moving around projects across drive, you never know if there are still some files left behind. It happens! You just downloaded a sound effect and its still in your downloads folder. Premiere has a tool for this, but what it does is it throws all the media into one big folder. Me on the other hand, I don’t want to live without my file structure, and I can’t have Premiere destroy this!
Premiere makes it surprisingly hard to just see where your files are. So I made a super simple tool at https://prem.simplymerlin.com/. Just throw in your .prproj file, and it shows you every file location of every piece of media in your project. That’s it. Fully local, fully free. I also have a filter bar, so you can filter the root of your project (i.e. E:\Videos\SimplyMerlin\01 Intro into Game Dev), and then it will only show files that are NOT in that root folder, so you can quickly check what’s left behind on your pc!
behind the scenes, a Premiere Pro project file is just a gzipped xml file. So I use a little library called Pako to unzip the file, and then the built in DOMParser to read the xml file, which works surprisingly fine! For the rest it’s just a svelte project set to prerender mode so it’s fully local, with bun! The source code is here btw.
Happy 2026 and happy hoarding old projects!