chimping.io · August 29, 2026

How to migrate off Frame.io without losing your comments and versions

Leaving Frame.io means moving four things, not one: your original files, your folder structure, your version stacks, and every timecoded comment. Most migrations only save the files. I built a free Mac app that carries all four — onto your own drive first, and into chimping.io if you want them living somewhere again.

Frame.io got folded into Adobe, and a lot of us are looking at the new version wondering whether our libraries should keep living there. Mine wasn’t going to. A decade of client projects — dailies, cuts, finals — sitting on a platform that changed underneath them.

Here’s what I learned moving it: the files were never the hard part. Any browser can download a file. What breaks in a migration is everything around the files — the folder structure a producer knows by heart, the version stack that shows how a cut evolved, and the comments. Especially the comments. A director’s note pinned to 01:00:33:09 two years ago is production history. Flatten it into a spreadsheet nobody opens and it’s gone.

So the app I built — chimping migrate, free, Mac — treats those as the cargo, not the packaging:

  • ·Originals download untouched into real folders on your drive. That alone is a complete backup you keep forever, even if it never goes anywhere else.
  • ·Version stacks stay stacks. On chimping.io a stacked video becomes one review asset with real version history — newest cut current, older cuts underneath it.
  • ·Comments land where they were written — on the right version, at the right timecode, with the commenter’s name and the original date. There’s also a comments.csv saved beside the files. A paper copy, effectively.
  • ·The folder tree survives on both ends — on your drive, in Deliveries, and in Video Review, identical to how it looked on Frame.

You route everything yourself: this folder to Deliveries as originals, these cuts to Video Review for commenting, this old stuff skipped entirely. Downloads and uploads both resume if the connection drops — nothing duplicates, nothing re-uploads.

It’s a one-time tool on purpose. Connect Frame, pick projects, download, route, send, check the result, delete the app. It has no other job.

chimping.io/migrate

The thing I keep coming back to: the work should outlive the platform it was reviewed on. Ten years from now nobody will care where the comments were typed. They’ll care that the director’s note at 33 seconds is still attached to the frame it was about.