Applies to: iOS and iPadOS 26 / macOS 26.5 / requires the sidecar

Explore and Investigate

Explore follows one subject across every camera at once, instead of making you pick cameras and guess at times. On iPhone it is a mode of the Scrub page. On Mac it is a panel on the Scrub page, described below.

It needs the Marcellus sidecar, because the grouping of sightings into a single visit is the sidecar's work.

How to get there

Explore keeps the Scrub page as it is: the player, the drum, Previous, LIVE and Next, the dossier card. Only the drum changes, from one camera's object tracks to one lane per camera.

• The toolbar toggle: the two-part button swaps between one camera and all cameras.
• Pinch in on the drum to go to all cameras.
• Long-press the dossier card and choose Explore this moment. This uses the time the cursor is on, not the event's start.
• The Explore row on an event's detail page, reached from the card's i tile.
• The Explore item in a Search row's context menu.
• Explore on a Review card.
• Tapping a push notification, when the alert belongs to an encounter.

To go back to one camera, tap the toggle again, or spread two fingers on a lane to open just that camera.

The lanes

One lane per camera, one cursor through all of them. Dragging the drum moves every camera together (slow drags step through the seconds; fast swipes move with the lanes' events), and the player shows the focused camera's frame at that instant. Time is shared, so you can see what the other cameras were doing at the same second.

• Busy cameras open, quiet ones fold. A camera with sightings near the cursor opens wide. A quiet one folds to a thin hairline at the right edge.
• The focused camera is the one in the player, and its lane is tinted.
• The window is short. The lanes show about a minute and a half either side of the cursor, with -1:00 and +1:00 marks. When a subject is selected, the window widens to fit the whole of its path.
• Previous and Next, and flicks, stop at events on any camera. If the next event is on another camera, the focus moves there.

Tap a lane, or a tile in the filmstrip (below), to switch camera. The cursor time stays where it is.

Selecting a sighting

Tap a bar to select that sighting. The camera becomes the focused one, and the cursor jumps to where the bar begins.

The cameras the subject passed through lead the drum in the order it walked them, joined by a glowing trail. A dashed bar in another lane is the where next suggestion: the camera the subject is likely to turn up on, and roughly when.

The strip under the player becomes the subject's controls: where next, Same / Not same, Follow, and x to clear the selection.

With nothing selected, the strip is a filmstrip instead: stills of the other busy cameras at the cursor time. Tap one to switch to that camera.

The confidence on a where-next suggestion is a word, never a score: confirmed, likely, or possible. It only reads "confirmed" once the sidecar has actually pinned it; the app never upgrades a guess on its own.

Same and Not same

Tap Same or Not same to correct the where-next suggestion.

This is worth doing. The sidecar chains sightings into one visit using identity matches, shared zones, camera adjacency, and learned transition times between camera pairs. Your corrections are the ground truth it learns those transition times from, so telling it that the figure on the shed camera is the same person shortens every future guess about that pair, and telling it "not same" stops a wrong chain from growing.

Scenes: cameras that see the same place

Several cameras often see the same person at the same moment, because those cameras look at the same spot. Elsinore shows that place as one stop rather than a hop between cameras.

• On the drum, a dashed bracket runs across the lanes that share the place, with the place name under it. A badge such as ×2 shows how many people were there, when Elsinore can tell.
• The subject card says who and for how long, for example "2 people · 0:28". A stop with several views shows a small stack. Tap it to switch views.
• Follow plays one place at a time, on its best view.

Elsinore works out which cameras see the same place from how quickly people appear on both. If it gets one wrong, go to Settings › Appearance & Display › Shared views and choose Automatic, Same place, or Different places for that pair.

The lanes use the full width of the drum, with the clock floating over them.

Follow

Follow plays the whole visit back for you. It focuses each sighting's camera in order, lets it play, and moves on at the end, so you watch someone move through the property without picking anything. If a camera has no recording for its stretch, Follow says so and moves on. Tap Follow again to stop and take control back.

Explore on the Mac

On Mac, Explore is part of the Scrub page too. Press Explore in the toolbar, or Command-Shift-E, and the page shows a timeline of every camera with a side panel beside it. Press either again to close it.

• The timeline runs sideways, one row per camera, with one cursor through all of them. Swipe sideways on the trackpad to scrub every camera together, and pinch to zoom the timeline in or out.
• The side panel is the subject card: who it is and for how long, the route so far, the stops with their views, and Where next. Follow and LIVE sit in the same panel.
• Where next lists the cameras this subject is likely to turn up on and roughly when. The confidence is a word, never a score: confirmed, likely, or possible. Each row has Same and Not same buttons, which teach the sidecar as described above.
• Follow plays the visit back one stop at a time, switching cameras for you. Press it again to stop.

• A scene wall. Where several cameras see one place, the player shares its row with that place's other views as small stills. Click one to switch to it.

• Hover peeks. Rest the pointer on a row and a small still of that camera at that moment appears above it. It never moves the cursor.

• Stale sightings. A sighting that has stayed open for more than half an hour fades, because it is usually a stuck tracker. While a subject is selected, thin ticks on its cameras mark each tracked object.
• Contact sheet. Command-Shift-A lays every camera's still at the cursor over the player row, refreshing about once a second. Click a tile to show that camera at that moment, drag a tile out to save its still, or right-click for Show This Camera, Copy Still and Save Still.
• Stills. Save Still (Command-S) and Copy Still (Option-Command-C) take the focused camera at the cursor. Save All Stills (Command-Shift-S) saves every camera into a folder you pick. Return leaves Explore on the camera at the cursor.
• Export a case. Export Case (Option-Command-E) writes a folder with a summary file (cursor, subject, sightings, where next, cameras), a still from every open camera, and one from each sighting. Export Follow Clips (Command-Shift-C) saves one video per Follow stop into a folder you pick. A status line over the player shows progress, with Show in Finder and Cancel.

Stills come from the same frames the timeline shows, not full-resolution video.

You can also open Explore at a moment: Explore at Cursor (Command-Shift-I) in the Reel menu, Explore this moment on the lit card's context menu, or the Explore button on a Review card.

Zoom In and Zoom Out (Command-= and Command--) change the timeline's span, as pinching does. In the Reel menu, Option-Shift-Left and Option-Shift-Right step exactly 60 seconds.