Image Chest
Image Chest is used to organize, manage, and find your graphic assets (images and videos). It’s not another clone of Apple’s Photos/iPhoto that gathers your images into some mysterious internal file blob. It leaves everything exactly where they came from and only catalogs the information. You can use Image Chest to move or copy your files, should you have the desire. I’ll often add files to an Image Chest catalog from my Downloads or Desktop folders, then use Image Chest to organize them by adding keywords and moving them to their final folders.
Organization is Image Chest’s main point. Keywords (Apple now calls their version “tags”) are the key to file organization. Image Chest even helps a little in this area by optionally adding a keyword of the parent folder’s name to each file. When you move a file to a different folder, the original folder keyword will be unassigned and the new folder’s keyword will be added. This makes it very easy to find all assets that have been cataloged for a particular folder.
If your files already have tags assigned and you want those to be used as keywords in Image Chest, you can select the assets after adding them and choose Catalog–>Copy OS Tags to Keywords. The opposite menu item is available should you want to use Image Chest keywords as tags for Spotlight searches, etc.
And speaking of finding assets, that’s another strong point of Image Chest. You can use the Keywords pane in each catalog’s main window to select keywords and then assign them or search for them*. Even more powerful is the Find… feature, where you can combine any number of attributes and values, such as “name begins with ‘pre’ and file type is image and date added < 1/2/2010 and keyword is ‘Project X’ and keyword is not ‘final’.” You can even save search patterns for really fast access from the Find menu, adding custom key equivalents for even faster use.
Oh, and yes, custom key equivalents can also be added to any of your keywords in each catalog. This makes it incredibly powerful for tagging your assets. The key equivs work on the selected assets in the main catalog window and even from within the Set Keywords… window. Use this feature to toggle the keyword with lightning speed!
Use the Set Note… menu item to edit notes on one or more assets. These are also searchable from the Find… command. Notes are visible in their own column when using the Details view (View–>Show Details).
What else can Image Chest do? Well, if you select some assets, then select the Used keywords, you can copy those keywords, then select other assets and hit command–v to paste those keywords and assign them to the selected assets.
Or you can drag & drop assets to copy them—including their keywords and notes—to other catalogs.
There’s a Show EXIF Window so you can see all the EXIF data associated with the selected asset.
There’s a Slideshow, just for the hell of it. You can control it with a few simple keys once you start it (see the Slideshow window).
In the Edit menu, there’s Omit Selected Assets to help you pare down the files you’re looking at after a search, like when you’re trying to find just the right set of images to use for a project. This assigns the 🚫 keyword to the assets.
Sorting is another strong point of Image Chest. Notice all the options in the View–>Sort submenu, and how the match all the possible columns you can show in the Details view. But what if you want to sort manually? Easy. Just choose View–>Sort–>Do Not Sort, then you can drag assets to reorder them. You can also presort your assets by first choosing one of the known sort methods, then choose View–>Sort–>Assimilate Current Sorting. This will order the assets according to the current sort and switch sorting to Do Not Sort. From that point on, you can drag assets around to any order.
If you edit any cataloged files, Image Chest will still remember the attributes at the time they were cataloged, so from time to time, it’s helpful to use Catalog–>Relink Assets… to find any updated files in a given folder and update the cataloged information.**
Should you move folders that contain assets to a different location, you can use Catalog–>Manage Folders… to point a folder known by Image Chest to a different location on disk. This window will also show you when any folder is missing.
That’s pretty much it. On the surface, Image Chest is incredibly simple. But underneath, it’s had a lot of work to make it fast, efficient, powerful, and easy to use. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I do.

©2020 Steve Mills, Armpit Studios
www.armpitstudios.com

*One note about keywords: They are NOT assigned directly to the files and are NOT searchable from Spotlight. They only exist in the catalog. Image Chest is here to catalog things and find cataloged things. Use Catalog–>Copy Keywords to OS Tags if you want to do that.
**Image Chest started off as a replacement for a great old image cataloging app from MultiAd Services called Search. By the time MultiAd dropped support and sales of Search, I had already amassed a great deal of Search catalogs, and I needed to future–proof all that work. So I wrote my own replacement in my spare time, then re–wrote it again once Carbon was killed. Everything in Search was cataloged, including the thumbnails, so if a volume or server was offline, you could still see all the info for its cataloged files. Image Chest started off that way, but then I found that for my own purposes, that was silly. I never lost my images, nor did I store them on removable media. So I did away with storing thumbnails, especially after I added real–time thumbnail view scaling. I might add it back some day mostly to speed up display of a just–opened catalog.