WinCatalog 2026.3 Release: GPS Photo Search, Path Filter, and One-Click Duplicate Selection

WinCatalog 2026.3 Release Hello, we’re glad to announce WinCatalog 2026.3. The main new feature this time is GPS search: WinCatalog reads the coordinates stored in your photos and lets you find pictures by where they were taken, with no internet connection required. This update also adds a path filter to the search options, one-click selection commands for duplicate cleanup, and a long list of scanning and deletion fixes.

Here’s what changed.

Find Photos by Where You Took Them

Almost every phone and modern camera writes GPS coordinates into the photos it takes. WinCatalog now reads those coordinates while scanning, resolves them to a city and country, and stores them in the catalog. After that you can search your photos by location the same way you search by name or date.

Two new rows appear on the Exif tab of the additional search options:

  • Has GPS coordinates, to separate geotagged photos from the rest of your collection.
  • Within a distance of a place, to find everything shot within a given radius of a spot. Distance can be in kilometers or miles.

The location picker lists every place that already exists in your catalog with a photo count next to it, so you can see at a glance where your pictures came from.

The right-click menu for photos has two new commands. Show on map opens the exact spot in your browser. Find photos taken nearby runs a location search around the selected photo, so you never have to open the search dialog.

The Properties panel gained Place and Map link rows, and there are two new tokens for Dynamic Columns: %gps_city% and %gps_link%. GPS searches run in the background, so the interface stays responsive even on a large catalog, and saved searches remember their GPS conditions.

All of this works offline. The city database ships with WinCatalog, nothing is looked up on a server, and no coordinates leave your PC.

Search by File Path

The Main tab of the additional search options now has a Path filter that matches against the full path of each entry. You can leave the search box empty and filter by path alone, or combine the path filter with a regular query.

The Contains condition finds your text anywhere in the path, including fragments with backslashes such as Backup\2019. The Advanced query condition treats the backslash as a word separator, which lets you anchor the match: *\Vacation matches folders whose name starts with “Vacation”, and *Backup\ matches folders ending in “Backup”.

Duplicate Selection Commands

Finding duplicates was never the hard part. Deciding which copy to keep and ticking hundreds of checkboxes was. WinCatalog 2026.3 adds a toolbar above the duplicate search results with selection rules that do the ticking for you:

  • Keep the newest, oldest, largest or smallest copy in each group.
  • Select by position: first copy, last copy, or all but one.
  • Select every copy on a given drive, in a given folder, or on disks that are currently connected.
  • Select by path length or folder depth, to keep the copy sitting in a sensible place and drop the ones buried five folders deep.

A status line shows how many items you have selected, the same commands are available from the right-click menu, and your selection survives re-sorting the list. The commands stay grayed out outside duplicate search results, so there’s no way to fire them by accident. Details are in Selecting Duplicates in Search Results.

Drag or Paste an Image to Set a Thumbnail

Drop an image file onto any Properties page, or paste one from the clipboard, and it becomes the item’s thumbnail. This is mostly useful for disks, folders, and any file the scanner couldn’t generate a picture for. See the Thumbnails tab.

Smaller Additions

  • You can reorder report columns by dragging the column headers. Column layouts are also remembered in more places now, including the specialized lists.
  • A new %drive_letter% token for Dynamic Columns shows a bare drive letter for local disks (D) and the server name for network paths.
  • The Info page of the backstage view has an Explorer button that opens the folder holding the current collection file.

Scanning

  • Folder sorting in large catalogs is faster, thanks to binary collation keys and better prefetching.
  • Files that failed to scan once are now marked and skipped on later updates instead of being retried every time. Repeat scans of collections with a few problem files finish sooner.
  • Scan plugins now stop when they stall rather than after a fixed timeout, so one stuck file no longer holds up the whole scan.
  • The scanning speed shown during a scan is more accurate.
  • The post-scan errors and warnings window is hidden by default now. If you want to see every warning, turn it back on in the scanning profile options.

Search Fixes

  • The Contains condition in text search filters was silently losing its wildcard, which made partial-word searches return less than they should. Fixed.
  • Fixed filter chaining when conditions are combined with duplicate search or restrict by fields.
  • The query engine behind text search filters was rebuilt for more predictable matching.

Deletion Fixes

  • Fixed a crash when deleting several duplicate files or folders at once.
  • Deleting real files from disk now runs through the Windows shell as a single batch. This fixes a race condition and makes WinCatalog report success correctly when files go to the Recycle Bin.
  • Deleting a folder also removes its children from the file operation queue.

Interface

  • Fixed pop-up menus collapsing the moment they opened.
  • The backstage view no longer flickers as you move the mouse across it.
  • The Tags, Locations and User-Defined Fields managers scale with the zoom setting.
  • Fixed the false “Scanning Interrupted” message shown after restoring a minimized update window.
  • Fixed a case where WinCatalog refused to open a collection that was not actually open.
  • Custom keyboard shortcuts now carry over correctly when you upgrade from an earlier version.
  • Translations were refreshed for all supported languages, including an updated German translation.

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 2026.3 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 2026.3 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: July 31, 2026