NeoFinder 8 was recently released for the Mac and is a substantial upgrade to a program that has been developed over 25 years. If you have been looking for something to catalog and manage your drives, photos, videos, DVDs, and audio CDs, NeoFinder continues to be the best program available. Beyond great features, Norbert M. Doerner is one of the most responsive developers I have encountered – listening to and implementing feature suggestions.
NeoFinder is 64-bit, built for Intel and Apple Silicon, and compatible with macOS 10.11 through the latest macOS 12 Monterey. It is also available for iOS. According to the website:
“NeoFinder quickly catalogs and manages your entire media and disk library, and your backup archive. It keeps track of your documents, photos, songs, movies, and folders wherever they are stored. It even manages your Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer documents.
Catalog your digital data: SSD, hard disks (internal, external, USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, HFS+, APFS, NTFS, ExFAT, FAT32), server volumes (AFP, SMB, FTP, Dropbox, Backblaze B2), Blu-rays, LTO volumes, USB sticks, DVD-ROMs, Audio-CDs, iPods, and get a full inventory of all files, folders, and important metadata, including thumbnails for your photos and video files.”
Version 8 was in development for two years and has added a number of features – expanding the already impressive versatility:
“NeoFinder 8 has a fresh user interface in six colors, an expanded Metadata Editor – faster navigation – full support for BlackMagic “.braw” video files – map with satellite images – show and edit metadata for any file in the Finder – import Hedge Canister LTO catalogs – machine learning image analysis and OCR – find similar files based on color and AutoTags – manually order Albums – certified for macOS 12 – optimised for M1 Max and M1 Pro, and so much more! Some of the new and features include:
- Fresh user interface with updated icons
- Added interface colors Space Blue, 25% Grey, 50% Grey, and 75% Grey
- Change color immediately
- Code optimized for the new M1 Pro and M1 Max ARM hardware from Apple
- Fully certified for macOS 12 “Monterey”
- New Map with satellite images, Point of Interests, and support to display multiple GPS GeoTags
- Hide and Show the LIBRARY and the entire left window part
- Folders in catalogs can be shown in LIBRARY for fast navigation
- Image Analyse of thumbnails to find text (OCR), faces, or AutoTags (requires macOS 10.15 or newer)
- Place your full contact data in the XMP Dublin Core Contact fields. These values are now cataloged, edited, exported, and can be used in XMP Presets
- Remembers the 30 last used values for each XMP editor field, and offers them for auto-entering
- Show or hide separate XMP fields in the expanded Inspector Settings
- Transfer or copy metadata between fields, in one or even multiple selected files
- Removed the “Save” button when editing multiple files in the XMP editor. Changed values will now update immediately, no button needed
- Show and edit all the usual metadata of any file in the Finder with the More File Info! Drag any file into the NeoFinder dock icon for that, or use the Finder context menu command, or the NeoFinder menu command to open that window as well
- Import Hedge Canister Catalogs of LTO tapes
- Rearrange items in Albums manually in the Icon View with the new “Unsorted” option in the Sort Menu
- Catalog BlackMagic .BRAW video files, with thumbnail and metadata!
- Edit the GPS GeoTag in the Map by just dragging it to a new location
- Edit the GPS view direction and altitude of one or multiple selected files
- ColorFinder: Find similar images by using the primary color, or similar colors
- Find similar images by using AutoTags
- Rename files and folders in the Finder when you rename them in any of the five view styles. Previously that was only possible in the Inspector
- Open an audio file the MP3-Editor Mp3tag.app for you, to edit ID3 tags
- Create a new folder inside a catalog and the volume
- Report generator gathers all used unique comments of the files inside a folder or catalog
- List View has a column “Suffix” for file name suffixes
- Sort menu has a “suffix” option to sort by file name suffix
- Catalog Sony Alpha A1 RAW files “.arw” with thumbnail and metadata
- Inspector setting to hide the thumbnail section when in Icon or Gallery View
- Add the results of a “Get Place name” search to all items within a certain radius around the initial item, optionally in all catalogs
- Menu command to start editing the Person data in the XMP Editor
- Menu commands to activate LIBRARY, the content area, and the Inspector
- “Find place names” now uses Openstreetmap.org for place data
- Cancel any text edit in the Inspector by using the Escape key. That will revert to the previous value of that field
- All edit fields in the Inspector can accept text using drag&drop
- Photo Contact Sheet can use a different background color
- Icon View can hide the file names, also the Photo Contact Sheet
- Find Editor offers “EXIF ISO is higher than” and “EXIF ISO is lower than” options
- Find Editor offers FPS search for video files
- Catalog metadata from .fits astronomical files
- Improves cataloging of very large WAVE files, and those written in 64bit format
- Improves handling of duplicates when copying catalog files into NeoFinder. A new dialog just like in the Finder will ask if the catalog should be replaced, or both kept
- Paste GPS GeoTag string from Google Maps or others as the GeoTag for items in NeoFinder
- Paste GPS GeoTag string from Google Maps or others into the Map search field to center the map at that coordinate
- Improves cataloging Finder Comments in macOS 11 and macOS 12
- Set the color label for a file in the Light Table using the main menu
- Improved handling of “cloned” volumes
- While loading large image files in the Light Table, NeoFinder will already display the thumbnail until loading is completed
- Catalog thumbnails of Olympus “.ORF” files
- Improves behaviour for newer ffmpeg versions cataloging certain .mts video files
- Works around a problem of Apples Photos.app writing non-standard GPS coordinate value formats into sidecar XMP files
- File name sequence detection while cataloging will now discover “.ari” files as well
- Detection of duplicate Keywords when loading the Controlled Vocabulary list works better now
- Improved performance when loading very large keyword lists (> 6,000 items) in the Controlled Vocabulary
- Failure to eject volumes will now display an error dialog
- Improves cataloging TIFF files created by certain scanners
- Capture One “.EIP” files are now recognized as Photos in the Display Filter and Find Editor
- Fixes a problem reading embedded XMP data in certain PDF files
- Improves handling of cataloging XMP color labels from sidecar XMP files of certain RAW file formats
- Fixes a problem in AppleScript when trying to access the “finder path” value
- Fixes many minor issues
- NeoFinder requires Mac OS X 10.11 or newer, Intel or ARM. Older versions of NeoFinder for previous system versions are still available on our web site”
