Spreadsheet or cataloguing software: what works for artists

What are the ways artists keep a record of their work?

There are four, broadly, and most artists use two or three at once without deciding to. A spreadsheet in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. Cloud folders, where each work is a folder of images and the file name carries the details. A notes app or notebook with a page per work. And cataloguing software, built to hold each artwork as a record with its images and history.

Is a spreadsheet good enough for an artwork inventory?

For a small body of work kept by one person, yes. A spreadsheet is free, fast, sortable, and will still open in twenty years. Its columns are the same fields any catalogue needs: number, title, year, medium, dimensions, edition, location, price, buyer.

The first place it breaks is images. Excel for Microsoft 365 and Excel 2024 can now place a picture inside a cell, and Google Sheets can too, but it is one picture per cell, and in Google Sheets a cell holding an image cannot also hold text. A work with a front view, a detail and a back needs three columns of thumbnails, or a link to a folder that breaks the day the folder moves.

The second is history. A sale, a loan, three exhibitions, a new frame: each needs its own row or a crowded notes column, and after a few years nobody, including you, can follow it.

The third is sending. A jury wants ten works as a PDF, a collector wants to see four pieces. From a spreadsheet both mean copying details by hand into something else, which is where the mistakes in captions come from. A workable rule of thumb: once the images live in one place and the details in another, you have two records, and two records drift apart.

What about keeping everything in folders?

Folders are good at images and poor at everything else. A folder per work, named with its inventory number and title, holding every photograph of it, is a sound habit whatever else you use. The trouble is that the details live only in the name, and a file name cannot be sorted by year, filtered by medium or totalled by price.

Folders also depend on whoever named them. The structure that made sense in 2019 rarely matches the one in your head today.

When does cataloguing software make sense?

When the catalogue has to do something rather than simply exist. You apply to calls often enough that assembling a portfolio has become a regular evening. You sell directly and need to remember who owns what. You want to show a selection to someone without sending the whole archive.

Cataloguing software holds each work as a single record with its images and full history, and produces what you need from that record: a portfolio, a list of works, a private link. The costs are real. A subscription, the time it takes to move in, and a dependence on a company that may change its prices or close.

Before choosing, check three things. Can you export everything, images included, in formats you can open without the service? Where is the data stored, and under which country's law? Is the archive private unless you decide otherwise? Then try at least two tools with ten real works before moving a hundred. The difference shows in how long it takes to add one work, not in the feature list.

How do you move from a spreadsheet without starting again?

Clean the spreadsheet, then import it. One row per work, one column per field, dimensions split into height, width and depth in a single unit, years written as numbers. A cataloguing tool worth using will read a CSV or Excel file and let you match its columns to its own fields, so the details come across in one go. Images usually follow separately, which is when having named the files by inventory number pays off.

Keep the old spreadsheet as a read only snapshot of where you started.

Which should you use?

Under fifty works, and you rarely apply or sell: a spreadsheet and a folder per work, both named by inventory number, backed up somewhere other than your laptop. Over a hundred works, or applications several times a year, or direct sales: a dedicated tool, chosen for its export and its privacy before its features.

Samlio is one such tool, built in Sweden for artists and collectors, with a record per work, spreadsheet import, a portfolio PDF that leaves prices out, and private viewing rooms for showing a selection. How to set up the record itself is covered in how to catalogue your own artwork.