ICAT Image Cataloging Tool

ICAT is a Perl script that generates a hierarchical HTML-based image catalog of JPG and GIF files in any directory. It is a highly customizable tool that takes advantage the magic of JavaScript to create dynamic html pages for viewing the images.

ICAT is free. Take it, use it, play with it, modify it, whatever... anything but sell it.

Features

Supports hierarchical directory structures for images.
Generates thumbnails automatically (on Unix and MacOS systems).
Allows quick viewing of a large number of images by organizing thumbnails into a compact area.
Maintains a thumbnail index using html frames to allow easy point-and-click access to images.
Provides slideshow-style "Next" and "Prev" buttons to make it easy for scanning sequentially through images and directories.
Generates medium-sized (550 pixel) images for intermediate view of large images without requiring loading of the full image.
Uses JavaScript to create dynamic html pages, making it unnecessary to have separate html files for each image.
Ability to extract and display comments from GIF and JPG images.
Thumbnail mouseover feature shows image name without wasting precious screen space.
Highly configurable to allow you to customize the html pages for your particular needs.
Option to save state information, allowing very fast re-cataloging (rebuilding a catalog of 1800 images takes 13 seconds on my 550 MHz G4). This makes adding images to existing large catalogs much less painful.
Organizes camera raw files and extracts JPG from Canon CRW with auto rotation.
Option to remove JPG from Canon CRW to conserve disk space.
Displays customizable EXIF picture information (using ExifTool).
Extracts and organizes Canon JPG preview files.
Distribution also includes handy image manipulation scripts.

Documentation and Download

Read the documentation
Download ICAT now (Version date: Nov. 29, 2019)
For those of you who are adventurous and running Mac OS X, I have a semi-functional pre-release which gives you a GUI for ICAT. So far though, the Settings in the GUI are non-functional, and they are still read as usual from the icat.args file in the image directory. Download preview ICAT for OS X now (June 12, 2002)

Examples

Requirements

To run this on Classic MacOS, you will need MacPerl and GraphicConverter. To run it on all other systems (including MacOS X), the "convert" utility must be available to allow automatic generation of thumbnail images. This utility comes standard on most Unix systems, and can be obtained for MacOS X by installing the imagemagick package (if you have Fink, this is as easy as typing "fink install imagemagick"). See the README.WINDOWS file included with the distribution for instructions on how to install this package for Windows.

ExifTool must be installed to use the EXIF features of ICAT. ExifTool is a highly customizable Perl script used to extract EXIF information from image files.