Art Catalog App | Offline Artwork Inventory & Sales Tracker

Art Catalog is an artwork inventory and sales-tracking app for individual artists. It keeps your whole body of work, with photos, sizes, media, materials and notes, in one searchable catalog, records what you sell and what it cost you, and does it all on your own device. There are no accounts, no cloud services, no analytics and no subscriptions. I originally made this app for myself – I wanted something that was offline that would let me keep track of all of the details of my artwork that matter to me.

Art Catalog at a glance

• What it is: an offline art inventory app and art sales tracker for painters, illustrators, sketch artists and other visual artists.
• Platforms: iPhone and iPad (iOS and iPadOS), including layouts built for Apple’s iPhone Duo.
• Privacy: all data stays on your device. No account, no login, no ads, no analytics, no third-party SDKs.
• Price: free download with a 7-day full-feature trial. Cataloging, photos, Gallery and Categories tabs are free forever. A one-time purchase (Full App Unlock, $9.99 at the time of writing) adds sales tracking, backup and restore, and CSV import/export. No subscription.
• Get it: Art Catalog on the App Store

1. Why I built it
2. Who Art Catalog is for
3. What Art Catalog does
4. Cataloging your artwork
5. Gallery and Categories
6. Tracking art sales
7. The dashboard
8. Backup, restore and CSV
9. Privacy and data safety
10. iPhone, iPad and iPhone Duo
11. Pricing
12. Compared with a spreadsheet or subscription software
13. Getting started
14. What it does not do
15. Frequently asked questions

Why I built it

I am a working artist (primarily painter) with a catalog of more than 470 pieces: oils, colored pencil, graphite, water pastel, and digital work. For years that catalog lived in a spreadsheet and then later an AppSheet app. It was fine until I needed to answer simple questions quickly. Which piece did I sell as a print? What did that commission actually earn after expenses? Where is the photo of that 9 by 12 portrait? Spreadsheets are flexible but awkward on a phone, and most art inventory software is built for galleries and priced as a monthly subscription, with your records living on someone else’s server.

I wanted one private, permanent, offline home for an artist’s catalog and sales records: something fast enough to use on a phone, and simple enough that a record takes seconds to add. Art Catalog is that app, and it is the one I built for my own catalog.

Who Art Catalog is for

Art Catalog is made for individual visual artists who track their own work; painters, illustrators, sketch artists, and anyone who keeps a growing body of originals and sells some of them as originals or prints. It suits you if you:

• Keep your catalog in a spreadsheet, notes app or folder of photos and want something purpose-built;
• Want a quick, searchable inventory of your artwork with photos on your phone;
• Sell originals, prints or both, and want to see gross sales, expenses and net revenue without building formulas;
• Care that your records and your buyers’ names stay private and offline.

It is not built for multi-person galleries, consignment accounting or invoicing. See what it does not do.

What Art Catalog does

The app has five tabs, plus Settings:

• Dashboard: your collection and sales at a glance, with breakdowns by medium and category.
• Catalog: every piece with its details, searchable and filterable.
• Gallery: a photo-first browsing view of your work.
• Categories: your work grouped by category, with cover images.
• Transactions: sales of originals and prints, with expenses and net revenue.
• Settings: light, dark or automatic appearance, Gallery options, full backup and restore, and CSV import and export.

Cataloging your artwork

Download Art Catalog on the App Store

Each catalog entry is a complete record of one piece. You can store:

• Title and photo (take one with the camera or choose from your photo library, and replace it any time);
• Size, creation date, medium and materials;
• Category and subject type, so you can group and filter your work your way;
• Reference (what you worked from), owner, and an optional link;
• Artist rating (Favorite, Decent or Dislike), so your best work is easy to surface;
• Notes and a longer description;
• checkboxes for where a piece is shown or sold: In store, On website, and whether it appears in a YouTube Short or standard YouTube video.

Search and filters

The Catalog groups your work by month of creation. Search finds pieces by title, notes and materials. You can filter by medium, category, subject type and date (year and month), and combine filters, for example “all Favorite oil paintings from this year”.

Photos you can actually inspect

Tap a piece’s photo to open it full screen and pinch to zoom, which is handy for checking brushwork or showing a buyer a detail. Photos are stored as files on your device and shown as thumbnails throughout the app.

Gallery and Categories

The Gallery tab is for looking at your work rather than managing it. It shows your pieces as a grid of photos in a fresh random order each time you open it, which is a good way to rediscover older work. In Settings you can limit it to pieces that have a photo, or to Favorites only.

The Categories tab groups your catalog by category (for example landscapes, portraits, animals, or a series you invent) as a grid of cover images with piece counts. Tap a category to see its pieces in the Catalog.

Tracking art sales

The Transactions tab is an art sales tracker built around how artists actually sell. Each sale records:

• the artwork, linked to its catalog entry;
• the type: Original or Print;
• the buyer’s name, the date and the size sold;
• the total amount and your expenses (framing, shipping, fees, materials), with net revenue calculated automatically;
• free-text notes.

Three details make this more useful than a spreadsheet:

• Selling an original updates the owner. When you record an Original sale, the artwork’s owner becomes the buyer. A Print sale leaves ownership alone, because you still have the original.
• Sales are linked to your catalog. Rename a piece and every past sale shows the new title. Open a piece and see its sales history.
• Sales are grouped by year with yearly totals, so tax-time questions are easy to answer.

Buyer names are stored only on your device. They are never shared or uploaded anywhere. For a fuller walkthrough of what to record and how gross and net revenue work, see how to track art sales, expenses and net revenue.

The dashboard

The Dashboard turns your records into a quick picture of your practice:

• a headline count of pieces created this year, over a collage of your recent work;
• a Collection card: total artworks, Favorites, how many are in your store, how many are on your website;
• a Sales card: number of sales, gross sales, expenses and net revenue;
• breakdown by medium and breakdown by category, in color;
• yearly sales with total and net revenue for each year;
• top sellers and recent sales.

Backup, restore and CSV

Because your data lives on your device, backing it up is your responsibility, so I made it a one-tap operation.

• Full backup: Settings, then Export full backup, creates a zip containing your catalog, sales and photos. It opens the iOS share sheet so you can save it to Files, iCloud Drive, AirDrop it to a Mac, or put it anywhere you like. Large collections are split into numbered parts so the app never runs out of memory.
• Restore: select your backup file or files, preview what will be added, then restore. Restoring only adds pieces and sales; it never replaces or deletes anything already in the app, and a safety backup of your database is saved just before each restore.
• CSV export: export your catalog and your sales as spreadsheet-friendly CSV files for your own analysis or records. Photos are not included in CSV files.
• CSV import: add pieces or sales from a CSV. To bring in an existing spreadsheet, export a catalog CSV first to get the exact column layout, paste your data in, and import. Import only adds new rows. The app accepts only CSV files in the format it exports.
• Update from CSV: a repair tool that matches existing pieces by title and updates only their notes and description, useful for fixing text in bulk without creating duplicates.

Backup, restore and CSV are part of the one-time unlock after the 7-day trial. See pricing.

Privacy and data safety

Privacy is the reason Art Catalog exists in the form it does. A record of everything you have made, who bought it and what you earned is personal business data. In Art Catalog:

• All data stays on your device, in a local database with photos as local files.
• There is no account, login or password, and no server to breach.
• No analytics, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party SDKs.
• No location data and no sharing or selling of data, to anyone.
• No AI service is used while you use the app. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
• The only outside service is Apple’s App Store, which processes the one-time purchase. The app never sees your payment information.

The trade-off is real and I would rather be upfront about it: with no cloud, there is no automatic sync between devices and nobody else holds a copy of your data. That is why full backup is built in. You can read the full policy at the Art Catalog privacy policy.

iPhone, iPad and iPhone Duo

Art Catalog runs on iPhone and iPad. On a wide screen in landscape, Catalog and Transactions switch to a list and detail layout: your list stays on the left while the selected piece or sale opens on the right.

It is also built for Apple’s iPhone Duo, the foldable. Navigation sits on the right-hand side within thumb reach on the outer display and when the inner display is held sideways. Half open like a book, the list and details split at the fold, and a single artwork opens as a two-page spread: the painting on one half and its details on the other. Propped like a laptop, the artwork sits on top and the details and controls below. Gallery and Categories grids keep clear of the crease.

Pricing

There is no subscription, and nothing to pay to start.

What	Cost
Download and 7-day trial with every feature	Free
Cataloging, photos, Gallery, Categories, search and filters, light and dark appearance	Free, permanently
Full App Unlock (one time): Transactions tab for sales tracking, CSV import and export, full backup and restore, and the sales parts of the Dashboard (gross sales, expenses, net revenue, yearly sales, top sellers, recent sales)	$9.99 one-time at the time of writing

The unlock is a single non-consumable purchase through the App Store and can be restored on any device signed in to the same Apple ID. After the trial, paid screens stay visible but dimmed, so you can always see what you would get.

Compared with a spreadsheet or subscription software

Questions	Spreadsheet	Subscription art inventory software	Art Catalog App
Works well on a phone?	Awkward	Usually yes	Built for iPhone and iPad
Photos with each piece?	Manual, easily separated	Yes	Yes, taken or chosen in-app, zoomable
Net revenue from sales and expenses?	You build the formulas	Varies	Automatic
Where your data lives?	Your files, or a cloud drive	The vendor’s servers	Only your device
Account required?	Often a cloud account	Yes	No
Ongoing cost?	Free	Monthly or yearly fee	One-time unlock, free core
Sync across devices and teams?	Via cloud drive	Yes	No (backup and restore instead)
Invoicing, tax reports, multi-user?	DIY	Varies	No

If you need a team, shared access or invoices, a subscription product may fit better. If you are one artist who wants a fast, private record of your work and sales, Art Catalog is designed for exactly that.

Getting started

1. Download Art Catalog from the App Store. The first launch includes a few example entries so you can see a filled-in record. Edit or delete them freely.
2. Add your first piece with the plus button in the Catalog. Take a photo, add a title, size, medium and category.
3. Bring in what you already have by adding pieces one at a time, or by exporting a catalog CSV, filling it in on a computer, and importing it.
4. Record a sale from the Transactions tab: pick the artwork, choose Original or Print, add the buyer, date, total and expenses.
5. Make your first full backup in Settings, and save it somewhere outside the phone.

What it does not do

• No cloud sync. Your catalog lives on one device. Use full backup and restore to move or protect it.
• iPhone and iPad only for now. There is no Android or web version yet.
• Not a multi-user or business system. No team accounts, invoicing or tax reports.
• Sale amounts are entered in dollars.
• CSV import is strict. It accepts only the format the app exports, and it only adds new rows.

Frequently asked questions

Get Art Catalog

If you are an artist who wants a private, offline home for your catalog and your sales, Art Catalog is on the App Store. Questions or feedback are welcome at amdallgallery@gmail.com, and you can see more of my work at jonamdall.com.

Download Art Catalog on the App Store

More guides

• How to move your artwork inventory spreadsheet into an app
• How to track art sales, expenses and net revenue as an artist