WinCatalog 2026.2 Release

Hello, we’re glad to announce WinCatalog 2026.2. This is a big update for our disk catalog software: a 5-star rating system, custom columns you build yourself, a completely new keyboard shortcut engine, and a full move to 64-bit. There’s also a long list of speed and stability work under the hood.

If you organize a large media or backup collection, a few of these are worth the upgrade on their own. Here’s what changed.

5-Star Ratings

You can now rate any item from 1 to 5 stars and sort your collection by quality or preference. Rating works the way you’d expect from a good file organizer:

• A graphical star control in the item Properties panel.
• A dedicated Rating column in the list and report views, with star icons.
• Keyboard shortcuts: press Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+5 to rate selected items instantly, and Ctrl+0 to clear a rating.
• A Rating submenu in the right-click context menu.
• A new search filter by rating, so you can pull up your top picks in one query.

Dynamic Columns (Custom Token-Based Columns)

This one is for people who want their catalog to look exactly the way they think. You can build your own columns out of metadata tokens, defined per collection. Mix and match tokens (including %tags% and the new %db_id%), rename them live, and they respect localization. If the built-in columns never quite matched your workflow, now you can make ones that do.

A New Keyboard Shortcut System

We replaced the old shortcut engine with a new one and gave it a proper settings page. You can assign shortcuts, filter them by category, and search by command name to find the one you want instead of scrolling a long table. Your existing custom shortcuts from older versions are imported automatically on upgrade.

Thumbnail Background Color

You can now pick a custom background color for thumbnail previews. This makes a real difference for transparent PNGs, logos, vector graphics, and product images that used to disappear against the default background. The color applies across the thumbnail list view too, with smooth hover animations.

WinCatalog Is Now 64-bit

WinCatalog 2026.2 ships exclusively as a 64-bit (x64) application. For most people this is invisible and just means more headroom for very large catalogs:

• Upgrading from an older 32-bit install reuses your existing install folder and cleans up the leftover x86 files for you.
• If you’re still on 32-bit Windows, WinCatalog shows a clear prompt pointing you to the correct setup.
• 7z archive scanning now is more reliable.
• Generally, the updated version works faster and smoothier on modern Windows versions.

Faster, and Lighter on Disk

A lot of this release went into speed. The improvements you’re most likely to notice on a big collection:

• Deleting from the catalog is much faster. Large deletes are now batched, which cuts the long waits on big collections.
• Importing one catalog file into another is up to 20x faster.
• Scanning process became faster thanks to single-pass file hashing, tuned database settings, and faster folder enumeration (especially for slow and network drives).
• Startup is faster, and the interface stays responsive during bulk updates and filtering.

Display and Thumbnail Fixes

• PNG transparency stays crisp at display scaling above 100% DPI.
• View mode (grid or thumbnails) is remembered per folder. You no longer need to constantly switch between different views: just set it up once, and WinCatalog will remember your preference.
• Fixed the white flash when switching tabs, and the one after renaming an item and clicking away.
• Column layouts now survive upgrades and language changes.
• Thumbnail zoom level (Ctrl+mouse wheel) is remembered per catalog file.
• Fixed EXE icon transparency and a few thumbnail background and selection-highlight glitches.

Scanning and AI Bridge

• AI Bridge now reliably returns image descriptions in the language you chose.
• Fixed a scanner crash on MP3 files with embedded cover art, plus media-handle leak fixes for steadier long scans.
• eComic scanning now generates cover thumbnails for CBZ and CBR archives whose pages use modern image formats like WebP and HEIC, so those comics show a proper cover instead of a blank tile.
• New option to stop writing scan errors into file comments.
• The Disk Scanner window now supports zoom, which helps on high-resolution screens.
• Better EXIF and ID3 handling, including lens-range fields for non-RAW images.

Smarter Re-scan for Missing Thumbnails

When you re-scan a folder, WinCatalog can fill in items that are missing a thumbnail without redoing the whole job. Until now that automatic re-scan only covered pictures and archives. It now also picks up media files, comics, ebooks, Office documents, PDFs, 3D models, RAW photos, fonts, and EXE icons, along with archives and disk images that came in with no children. So if you added support for a new file type by upgrading, a quick re-scan brings the existing entries up to date instead of forcing a full rebuild.

Smaller Things Worth Mentioning

• A quick right-click menu for assigning tags.
• A “Stretch Thumbnails” toggle in the View menu to fill each tile instead of showing the image at native size.
• The old offline CHM help file is gone, replaced by an online help link that we can keep current.

Upgrading to WinCatalog 2026

WinCatalog 2026 is a free upgrade for everyone who purchased a full license to WinCatalog 2024 (not an upgrade from a previous version), or a Lifetime Major Upgrades option, or the upgrade to WinCatalog 2024 within the last 6 months from the release date (starting from October 1st, 2025). For those who have a valid license for the 2026 version, version 2026.2 is available as a free minor upgrade.

Others can purchase an upgrade at a special price with a 50% discount. To check your upgrade status or renew a registration key, please click here.

Download

To download WinCatalog 2026.2 please click here. You do not need to uninstall a previous version of WinCatalog. Just install the latest version over the existing one.

If you’re not yet a WinCatalog user, try the free trial and see how it works as a disk catalog and file organizer for your own collection.

Posted on: June 29, 2026