Search Paths in ProPresenter7 are a great way to locate media that has been previously disconnected. If you have ever imported media and then some time later it doesn't show up, its likely that the media has been moved or deleted. In the case that the media has been moved, you can use search paths to link this data back into ProPresenter.

All paths in ProPresenter7 are now saved as a data pair of root and relativePath, So a file at /Users/<username>/Movies/Sunday/Awesome.mp4 is broken down to the root of /Users/<username>/Movies and relative path Sunday/Awesome.mp4. We can then generalize the root and say that “this is the user’s movie folder”. The common roots are paths we defined and are standard available paths on both platforms. Videos on windows maps to <user>\Videos and on Mac will map to ~/Movies. Now, without any additional effort, if I send you the document and you have the media asset in your user movie directory at Sunday/Awesome.mp4, it’ll automatically link up with no additional effort. Where the search paths come in is if ProPresenter cannot find the file at it’s expected location, and search paths are enabled. For each enabled file root, ProPresenter will check the file’s relative path against that root to see if a file exists there. It does require the full relative path to match. Working the example file above again, we’re looking for Sunday/Awesome.mp4. If you have search paths enabled and the file is in your Documents directory <user>\Documents\Sunday\Awesome.mp4 then it’ll automatically re-link and work without having to modify the original document. 

Using Search Paths in this way solves a number of issues we previously faced with paths in past versions - especially with data that needs to be cross platform compatible. Search paths used to work on a filename only basis, which caused a good bit of unpredictable behavior when it came to matching the correct media, with the current behavior in ProPresenter7 this is no longer the case.