WinCatalog Turns 25

WinCatalog 25th Birthday This week WinCatalog turns 25.

It’s a round number, and we’ve been wondering for a while what to write about it. Twenty-five years is a long time for a program. When WinCatalog started, people cataloged stacks of burned CDs, 700 MB each. Today they catalog external drives with several terabytes on each, NAS boxes and network folders, and some of them let a local AI model write descriptions for their photos. WinCatalog has changed a lot along the way. What hasn’t changed is the main idea: you should be able to find any file, even when the drive it’s on is sitting in a drawer.

Here is how WinCatalog looked over the years, from one of the very first versions in 2002 to the upcoming WinCatalog 2027:

WinCatalog Light, 2002 – one of the very first versions. Back then, a catalog was mostly burned CDs, 650–700 MB each. Surprisingly, it still runs on Windows 11. WinCatalog 2009. Since 2003, WinCatalog has let you create virtual folders and add items that aren't files at all: books, movies, contacts, anything you want to keep track of. WinCatalog 2014. Since 2012, WinCatalog stores image thumbnails right inside the catalog, so you can browse your photos even when the drive they're on is sitting in a drawer. WinCatalog 2026: lightning-fast search, several catalog tabs, photo descriptions written by a local AI model, thumbnails for many file types beyond images, and a lot more metadata for every file. WinCatalog 2027 with the dark theme. Many of you asked for it, and it's almost ready.

Built with your help

Many of the changes over these years started with a message from one of you. Someone needed a search filter we didn’t have. Someone found a file that crashed the scanner. Lots of people asked for a dark theme (we heard you). A good part of what WinCatalog can do today came from these suggestions, and they still decide where development goes next. So please keep sending them. We read every one, even when it takes us a while to get to it.

Thank you for buying WinCatalog and upgrading it, for recommending it to friends and colleagues, for bug reports with screenshots attached, and for your patience while we track down a problem we can’t reproduce on our side. WinCatalog exists because of you.

Plenty of road ahead

For software, twenty-five sounds like retirement age. It doesn’t feel that way to us. If anything, it feels like we’re in the thick of it, with a lot still ahead. The next stop is close: WinCatalog 2027 with the dark theme is almost ready. Further on there’s a long list of new features. Duplicate search is getting smarter, and there will be new tools for analyzing and comparing what’s in your catalogs. There’s also something WinCatalog has never had before: a version for Mac, and hopefully Linux too. Part of that work is already done. We’ll tell you more when there’s more to tell.

For now, there’s a cake with 25 candles on it, and those take a while to light.

25 years, 25% off

Usually the one with the birthday gets the presents. This year we’d like to do it the other way around. WinCatalog turns 25, so until October 16 Personal and Professional licenses are 25% off, one percent for every year. You don’t need a coupon code: buy WinCatalog, and the discount is applied at checkout. And since every license includes one free major upgrade, you’ll get WinCatalog 2027 with the dark theme as soon as it’s out.

Happy birthday, WinCatalog!

The WinCatalog Team

Posted on: October 11, 2026