You remember the photograph. But which drive holds the original?
MediaVault is a private visual catalog for Mac that helps photographers find and understand work spread across assignments, formats, folders and disconnected drives—without moving or altering the originals.
One photograph opens the entire assignment.
The preview begins with the image as the photographer remembers it, then follows the project through related photographs, audio, video, writing and the offline drive containing the original.
Begin with the work. End at the original.
Click to play the private photography archive demonstration.
A photographic archive is more than photographs.
Lightroom, Capture One and Photoshop are essential for working with images. MediaVault sits above the individual application, preserving the larger project and the creative relationships around it.
See the complete assignment
Keep photographs connected to interviews, video, field notes, captions, research, layouts and published work.
Leave the archive untouched
MediaVault records what the work is and where it lives. It does not move, rename, duplicate or reorganize original files.
Search the catalog first
Identify the project and its storage location while the source drive is offline, then connect only the drive you need.
The drives became the archive.
Years of work often end up distributed across storage devices named for a project, a year or whatever made sense at the time. The files may be safe while the knowledge of what each drive contains becomes harder to recover.
The files survived. The map connecting them did not.
After more than fifty years in photography, documentary production, writing, music and multimedia, Richard Olsenius could still remember the photograph, person and assignment—but not always the filename, folder or drive containing the original.
MediaVault grew from the need for a private card index that could restore those connections without disturbing the archive it was built to describe.
If MediaVault may be relevant to your readers, the full app is yours to review.
Reply to Richard’s email or request a reviewer copy below. Reviewer access, a concise fact sheet, press images and a longer guided demonstration are available.
Replace the VIDEO_EMBED_URL value in the code with a YouTube or Vimeo embed URL.