REVIEW · DISK CATALOGUER
Verdict: NeoFinder is worth it if your files live on many drives, servers or archives that are not always connected: it catalogs them, with thumbnails and metadata, so you can search everything while the drives sit in a drawer. For the documents on the Mac in front of you, its catalog-first approach is more than you need.
6 November 2026 · By Ishtiaque Hossain · 4 minute read · reviews NeoFinder 9.3.1
Looking for a file you can describe but not name? Try Shlexball. The first 30 searches are free and need no account.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon. 16 GB memory. On a phone? Email yourself the link.
This review is based on NeoFinder's own pages, read on 14 October 2026. Every claim links to the page it came from. We are the makers of Shlexball, so we say plainly where NeoFinder does better.
| Price | Free trial; buy a licence and keep your catalog database |
| Runs on | macOS 10.15 Catalina or later, including macOS 27; Apple ARM or Intel; iPhone and iPad app |
| What it catalogs | Internal and external disks, NAS and servers, Dropbox, Backblaze B2, LTO, Blu-ray, DVD and more |
| Find tools | QuickFind, Find Editor, Find Duplicates, Spotlight search, Smart Folders, faces and similar photos |
| Version | 9.3.1, certified for macOS 27 |
| Best for | Photographers, video producers and archives spread across many drives |
NeoFinder, which used to be called CDFinder, catalogs and manages your entire media and disk library and your backup archive. ZDNet called it the holy grail of media asset management, as its site notes.
A catalog is a full inventory of a drive: every file and folder, with important metadata and thumbnails for photos, songs, videos and documents. Once a drive is cataloged, you can search it without connecting it.
NeoFinder catalogs SSDs and hard disks of every common format, server volumes over AFP, SMB, NAS and FTP, Dropbox and Backblaze B2, Blu-rays, LTO tapes, USB sticks, DVDs and audio CDs.
QuickFind runs a fast search across everything you have cataloged, and the Find Editor builds precise queries. You can also find duplicate or unique files, create Smart Folders, and search for faces and similar photos.
For files on the Mac itself, NeoFinder can search through Spotlight. It can also catalog and search the contents of text files.
The headline benefit is simple: whatever you are looking for, NeoFinder knows which drive holds it, even when that drive is offline, so you only plug in the one you need.
Photos get thumbnails and full EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata from JPG, RAW, TIFF, DNG, PDF and more, plus a light table for culling, contact sheets, web galleries and AI tagging to find images later.
Video gets thumbnails and metadata such as bitrates, subtitles and codecs, with native support for BlackMagic RAW and RED files. Music gets tags, cover art and lyrics, from MP3 and AAC to FLAC and DSD.
An integrated XMP editor adds ratings, hierarchical keywords, descriptions, people, copyright and location to files in the standard Adobe XMP format, and GeoFinder finds photos by where they were taken.
Teams can share one NeoFinder database on a NAS or file server, and Windows colleagues can join through abeMeda. NeoFinder says it handles thousands of disks, millions of files and 500 Terabytes of data.
It is made by Norbert M. Doerner of West-Forest-Systems and is used by more than 150,000 customers and companies in 114 countries. It runs in eight languages.
You can try it for free, then buy a licence and keep the catalogs you built. The pages we read link to the store but do not list prices, and the user guide covers licence types.
Photographers and video producers with years of archive drives are the obvious audience; its user stories include a studio with over 600TB of footage and a photographer moving from Media Pro.
If you are coming from another cataloging app, NeoFinder imports twenty-five foreign catalog formats and offers cross-grade discounts.
NeoFinder is the tool for which drive holds the file. For documents on your Mac that you can describe but not name, Shlexball finds them from a plain-English description, searching names and the text inside files, including PDFs and Word documents.
Shlexball runs its language model on your Mac and never uploads files. The first 30 searches are free and need no account.
For documents on your Mac that you can describe but not name, try Shlexball: 30 free searches.
▶ DOWNLOAD SHLEXBALLCataloging disks, servers, cloud storage and archives so you can search their files, with metadata and thumbnails, even when they are not connected.
Yes. NeoFinder 9.3.1 is certified for macOS 27 and runs on Apple ARM and Intel Macs from macOS 10.15 Catalina.
Yes. Find Duplicates locates duplicate or unique files across your catalogs.
Yes. You can try NeoFinder for free and, if you buy a licence, keep using your catalog database.