Learn Obscura Catalog.

Obscura Catalog is a macOS app to organise, describe and find your images, and to keep the catalogue raisonné of a photographic body of work: numbered works…

The licence and free tier, settings and updates, the main window, where Catalog keeps its data, backing up and restoring the library, moving it, keeping…

Turn a folder into a project, the SHA-256 fingerprint, duplicates, resume an interrupted import, locate a moved folder.

The grid, the keyboard, the loupe, comparison, the inspector, ratings, flags and labels, versions and relationships.

Manual and smart collections, tags, quick search, advanced search and saved searches.

What Catalog reads, editing metadata, the XMP sidecar, writing into the file.

Controlled vocabulary, hierarchy, synonyms, CSV import, CSV and SKOS export.

On-Mac analysis, naming, merging and splitting people, close photos and likely duplicates, privacy.

Catalog read without being modified, dry run, what is carried over, resume and report.

Work and file, numbering, the record and its tabs (rights, relations, files, documents), the change history, statuses, completeness, creating works from files.

Competing attributions, editions and prints, conservation, the provenance chain and auction sales.

The directory of persons and organisations, authority identifiers, duplicates and merging, living persons.

Exhibition history and bibliography, shared by the whole corpus.

Edit several works, attribute in batch, series values, undo.

Works, exhibitions and publications: column mapping, dry-run preview, unknown agents, rejection report.

CSV in twelve tables, LIDO 1.1, CIDOC CRM, the full library export, the package for Obscura Vault, and the confidentiality rule.

The signing key, issuing, re-issuing, revoking, verifying a PDF.

Portfolio, catalogue raisonné and inventory as PDF/A.

File not found, interrupted import, publishing refused…

The words of this guide.

Screen by screen, what to type in each field, and CSV files ready to import.