How to catalogue your own artwork, and keep it catalogued

What should an artwork record contain?

Nine details identify almost any work, and they are the same ones museums and police rely on. Object ID, a documentation standard begun by the Getty Information Institute in 1993, launched in 1997 and licensed since 2004 to ICOM, the International Council of Museums, lists them: type of object, materials and techniques, measurements, inscriptions and markings, distinguishing features, title, subject, date, and maker. It was designed so that a stolen object could be recognised from its record alone.

For an artist's own catalogue, that list turns into practical fields.

An edition is a set of identical prints or casts, numbered so that 3/25 is the third of twenty five. An artist's proof, written AP, is a print from the same run that the artist keeps outside the numbered edition.

Three more fields grow over time: exhibitions, sales and condition. A sale recorded on the day, with date, buyer and price, is the first link in the work's provenance, the documented chain of ownership that follows it for the rest of its life.

How should you number your artworks?

Use the year followed by a sequence: 2026.001, 2026.002, and onwards, in the order works are finished or first recorded. The number tells you roughly when something was made, never runs out, and does not depend on a title you might change. Many museums number their acquisitions the same way, with the year of acquisition first.

Write the number on the work as well as in the record, in pencil on the stretcher or on a label on the back. A number that exists only in a file is lost the first time a work and its file are separated. For older pieces you cannot date exactly, use your best year and mark it as approximate. A number with a question mark beats a work with no number.

How do you photograph work for a catalogue?

Photograph each work before it leaves the studio, because afterwards you may never see it again. One full view with all four edges visible, the camera square to the surface, in even daylight without direct sun. One detail close enough to show the surface. One of the back, with its inscriptions and labels.

A phone is enough for a catalogue record. Even light and a square frame matter more than the camera, because they are what let the image be cropped and colour-corrected later for print or an application. Keep the original file. A copy sent through a messaging app has lost detail you cannot get back.

Where do you start if you already have a hundred works?

With what is in the studio now, then backwards, one year at a time. Trying to catalogue twenty years at once is how the project stops in the second week. Recording current work first makes the catalogue useful immediately, for the next application or the next sale.

For older work, gather what already exists before photographing anything: the camera roll, emails to galleries, invoices, exhibition lists, the spreadsheet from 2019. Most of the information is somewhere. The task is bringing it into one record per piece and marking what is missing, rather than guessing. An empty field is honest. A guessed measurement copied onto a loan form is not.

Sold and given works belong in the catalogue too. Record what you know, with whatever image survives. A catalogue that lists only what the artist still owns cannot answer the questions a collector, an estate or a researcher will eventually ask.

Where should the catalogue live?

Somewhere that keeps the image and the details together, that can be searched, and that someone other than you could open. Those three conditions rule out more setups than they allow. A folder of images holds no details. A spreadsheet holds details but struggles with images. A notebook cannot be searched and exists in a single copy.

There is a fuller comparison in spreadsheet or cataloguing software: what works for artists. Whatever you choose, keep an export somewhere you control, and check once a year that it still opens.

Samlio keeps one record per work, with its images, measurements, materials, edition, location and sales, private unless you choose to share it, and a list already kept in a spreadsheet can be imported with its columns mapped to those fields. When a call asks for a portfolio, the guide to what an open call portfolio should contain picks up from here.