TL;DR: fotoARRAY makes large photo collections easy to take in. Up to 100 tiles fit on a single screen, and you can page quickly by date, album or folder. You will find every picture again and can share your collection with others. The basic version for Windows is free, has no time limit and is fully usable every day.
For creative work, there is a photo editor with its own RAW decoder and high-quality basic controls. Tile layouts can be saved as a file for a photo book. External editors and RAW programs integrate seamlessly.
PRO scrolls through hundreds of thousands of images without paging, exports in the background and offers more output options. The editor, inside the catalog or as a standalone program, adds layers with masks, healing and clone tools, perspective correction, curves, color correction, black-and-white and infrared development, and an effects chain with film looks, lens simulations and liquify. Presets and a preset browser with previews let you reuse your favorite looks.
Buy once, use forever. No subscription.
fotoARRAY is made by WPCubed GmbH in Munich, Germany. We have been writing tools for software developers for many years, among them the WPTools word processing components and various PDF libraries. That experience sits inside fotoARRAY. But also the love for photography, the urge to experiment, the fun to scroll through the images which tell the story of past years.
fotoARRAY was first released in August 2020 and has been continuously improved ever since. The result is fotoARRAY V3.
The catalog is now managed by a small background service, the display is accelerated by the graphics card, and the main program and the fotoARRAY File Browser can work with the same catalog. Catalogs from the previous version can be imported with all their stars, colour labels, keywords, and albums.
Also see "fotoARRAY Technology".
The architect of this software, Julian Ziersch, photographs himself, and the program is written for exactly that group: people with a collection that grew over years, who want to look at their pictures, pick from them and show them rather than administer them. Almost every function in fotoARRAY exists because it was missing while working with our own pictures. That is why there is a date filter for dates that repeat every year, why the crop sits on the tile itself, and why browsing stays fast while the archive drive is in a drawer.
The user interface is in English or German and can be switched while the program runs. We answer questions in English and in German, by e-mail or from the support dialog in the program, which opens a ticket with us. The invoice comes from Munich, the licence and ticket servers are in Germany, and your pictures and your catalog stay on your computer anyway, because fotoARRAY needs neither an account nor a cloud.
Every image in the catalog has a preview in HD quality inside the database. Scrolling, zooming and selecting work on these previews, so the speed does not depend on the disk with the originals. You can browse the pictures of an archive drive that sits in a drawer, or the pictures of a notebook that is somewhere else. When you open an image in the single view or in the editor and the original is not available, fotoARRAY simply shows the preview and tells you so.
Our test catalog with far over 400,000 images and HD previews takes 63,5 GB of real disk space on the hard drive. This is small enough to keep the whole collection on the internal SSD of a notebook, while the originals stay on slower or external drives.
The grid offers several layout modes. Besides the classic grid there are row layouts, square layouts and page layouts that arrange the pictures like the pages of a photo book. The crop, the horizon and the rotation are changed directly on the tile, the layout follows immediately. This means you can prepare a set of images for a book, a slideshow or a collage without opening each picture in a separate editor.
The built-in photo editor develops RAW files with its own in-house decoder and offers high-quality basic adjustments even in the free version. The PRO version adds mask, texture and copy layers, blend modes, curves and precise color correction. Black-and-white and infrared development plus a liquify tool open up creative looks, and the editor also runs standalone without the catalog.
NEW: External RAW developers which support a command line interface can be used, too.
fotoARRAY is a download of a few dozen megabytes. It runs from its folder, it needs no cloud account and no subscription, and the catalog is a single folder that can be copied to another computer. We think that the program which keeps your family pictures accessible in 20 years should be small, understandable and free of servers that may disappear. The functions of fotoARRAY were chosen with this in mind.
NEW: You can also share just a single album which can be viewed with a web app. (Demo : MyFotoARRAY)
You can drag pictures from the grid into any other program. Before you do that, you can decide what is handed over: the thumbnail, the best developed JPEG or the original file. If the original drive is not connected, the thumbnail still works. The same choice is available for copy and paste. This makes fotoARRAY efficient to quickly share a memory with friends or family in a message or e-mail.
Albums and hierarchical keywords are shown as trees in the left panel. The timeline lists every year, month and day on which a picture in the current selection was taken. You can click one or many items to create a filter. The map shows where the pictures were taken and lets you set a position for pictures that have none. The filter bar shows which conditions are active, and the filter editor handles camera, lens, ISO, aperture, file type, text fields and dates, including dates like dd=03 mm=07 to search for "every 3rd of July".
Select one or more folders, optionally with subfolders. fotoARRAY reads the metadata, creates the previews and stores everything in the catalog. Folders can be synchronised again later, so new pictures are picked up and moved pictures are found again. Pictures that were already imported are skipped, and a JPEG next to a RAW file of the same name can be ignored on request.
A picture can be in several albums at the same time. Keywords are hierarchical and are assigned with a checkbox in the tree. Stars, colour labels and the flags accept, neutral and reject are set with the keyboard while you look at the picture. Every album and every keyword can show a colour or a symbol on the tile, so you can see at a glance where a picture belongs.
Switch between the grid, the single view (space bar), the instant slideshow (F1) and the compare view (F3). Arrange a selection as pages and export them as PDF or as JPEG files. Hand the pictures over to a RAW developer, to a layout program or to a web gallery, and let fotoARRAY copy the results back.
The preview (F1) can be fully controlled with just left and right mouse clicks plus the mouse pointer is automatically hidden.
The program does not try to replace Capture One, DxO PhotoLab or Lightroom. It shares the data with them. You collect the pictures for a project in an album, export the originals with their sidecar files into a project folder, develop them in the program you prefer, and fotoARRAY copies the changed sidecars and the finished JPEG files back to the catalog and updates the thumbnails accordingly. Watched directories do this automatically.
fotoARRAY includes its own developer that works on RAW, TIFF and JPEG files. Every edit is stored as a recipe, so the original image is never changed. The PRO edition adds layers with masks, repair and clone tools, perspective correction, an effect chain with film looks, lens simulations, liquify and much more, plus templates with a preview browser. Special care went into the tone algorithms, which handle light cleanly and recover highlights with fine gradation.
This editor is built for human creativity and the joy of experimenting, not for a single button that gives everyone the same picture.
The page layouts of the grid are exported as a PDF that contains the original, uncropped JPEG data of every picture. A layout program can later change the crop of any picture in that PDF (or scale the image in its frame). A photo book with hundreds of pages is ready in minutes.
The Free Edition exports flattened pages with a small footer instead.
The fotoARRAY File Browser is a separate program for the folders on your disks. It is basically "just" a file browser, but it connects to the fotoARRAY server if that had been started. Doing so shows the thumbnails from the catalog once you browse a folder which had been imported to the catalog.
It optionally synchronizes the catalog, so when you rename or move a folder there, the catalog follows.
It starts fotoARRAYRAW for a picture and imports a folder into the catalog with one click.
The file browser is useful to find the directories which have been integrated into the catalog and to check which are missing. It also contains a tool to manage the sidecar files or to clean up cache files which were created by other programs.
One license for fotoARRAY 3 PRO, fotoARRAYRAW and the File Browser.
It is valid for four installations in the same household.
There is a test period that does not require registration.
The card copy tool copies pictures from a memory card into folders that are named by date, camera or any template you define. It handles sidecar files, detects collisions, filters by date and can import the copied pictures into the catalog in the same step. It is included in every edition.
fotoARRAY 3.1 includes AI content recognition in the PRO edition. Select from the recognized tags with a few clicks, and the results update immediately. The AI extension is a separate download of about 600 MB.
Content recognition assigns matching tags to each image from a fixed list of more than 4,000 terms. These tags do not become keywords, but they can be used flexibly for searching.
Image recognition runs entirely on your own computer.
AI filter dialog:
fotoARRAY does not want to replace Capture One or DxO PhotoLab. It wants to work with them. You keep your favorite RAW developer, while fotoARRAY keeps the overview and handles the exchange. That said, the integrated RAW developer was built with care for every byte of the RAW file, and it delivers clean, detailed results on its own. For many images, you will never need to leave fotoARRAY at all. And with PRO it will inspire you with creative and innovative tools.
Recently, new RAW developers have appeared, such as RapidRAW and LightCraft. If you want to use them, fotoARRAY does not stand in your way. The integration dialog creates a script that exchanges data with them. You can then send an image to the developer of your choice, or several images at once in the PRO edition. fotoARRAY’s own crop, perspective correction and liquify tools can then be applied to the result.
Many catalog programs are built around metadata forms. fotoARRAY is built around the pictures. Its speed brings large collections to life: browsing and publishing stay enjoyable even with 300,000 images, many of them taken at the same place or of the same subject. And the shots once dismissed as rejects often turn out to be the ones that bring back a moment best.
Smartphones deliver finished pictures that a lot of software has already decided about. The phote editor inside fotoARRAY goes the other way and puts the techniques of photography and optics back into your hands: the character of a lens with its bokeh and vignette, the light in the scene, film grain and film curves, split toning, the depth of the picture. These are ideas for human creativity, and the results differ from picture to picture because you made the choices. An AI model is available to estimate the depth of the scene so you can place light or atmosphere in it.
The catalog is served by a small server process. The main program and the File Browser are clients of that process. None of them can damage the database, because none of them writes to it directly. If a client crashes, the catalog is not affected. Every change is journaled and can be undone.
The functions were weighed against the size of the download, and the download stayed small. The catalog is small too: about 400,000 images with smaller previews fit into 60 GB. No cloud, no telemetry, no account.
fotoARRAY V3.1 includes AI content detection in the PRO edition. You can pick from the recognized keywords with just a few clicks, and the results update instantly.
But even without the AI add-on, fotoARRAY gives you hundreds of small thumbnails on a single screen and fast scrolling, filtered by date, album or folder. If you remember taking a picture, you will find it quickly. Hold ALT while the mouse is over a tile to see a larger preview. Add CTRL to view the image at its original resolution.
Import folders, keep previews and metadata in one compact file, browse also when the originals are offline. Synchronise folders later to pick up new and moved files.
Normal albums, smart albums built from a filter, special albums and a basket for quick collecting. A picture can be in many albums. Colour or symbol on the tile.
Hierarchical keywords in a tree with checkboxes. Select branches to preselect pictures, combine keywords with AND or OR.
Years, months and days of the current selection. Click one or more entries. Date filters like "every 24th of December" are typed into the filter.
Stars, colours, flags, file type, camera, lens, ISO, aperture, text fields, duplicates, same day, similar pictures and dominant colour. The filter bar shows what is active.
See where the pictures were taken, set positions from the map, derive positions for pictures taken at the same time as others.
Offline map data with PRO.
Grid, rows, squares, masonry and page layouts. Crop, straighten, rotate and flip directly on the tile. Manual order for albums.
Single view, instant slideshow, compare view with synchronised zoom, light and dark theme, scalable user interface.
Non destructive developer for RAW and JPEG. Free: tone, colour, white balance and detail. PRO: layers, masks, repair, perspective, effects and templates.
Export the page layouts as editable PDF with the full JPEG data, as flattened PDF or as JPEG files. Batch export of developed pictures.
Export albums with sidecars for RAW programs,
planned: watched directories that copy results back, share pictures to a phone with a QR code.
Browse folders with the marks from the catalog, filter by catalog criteria, rename and move folders and keep the catalog in step.
Stand alone photo editor and RAW developer with depth masks, variants, templates and a command line for scripted export.
Group series and near duplicates into stacks, automatically by time distance and similarity. A collapsed stack shows one cover picture.
Copy pictures from a memory card into folders named by your template, with sidecars, date filter and import into the catalog.
No time limit, no registration. Shows up to 100 images per view, with a small page bar below the grid to move on to the next set. Catalogs exported from PRO for sharing can be scrolled without any limit.
The Free Edition includes the catalog handling. It imports, organizes, finds and shows your pictures without a time limit. It shows up to 100 pictures per view, exports flattened PDF pages with a small footer, and its developer is limited to tone, colour, white balance and detail. A catalog that PRO exported for handing over is shown by the Free Edition without the limit, so a photo legacy can be passed on and browsed for free. PRO removes the limits and adds the photo editor with layers and effects, the export paths, the exchange with other programs, the File Browser and fotoARRAYRAW.
| Feature | Free | PRO |
| Pictures per view | 100, + "Next" Button | unlimited, super fast scrolling |
| Catalog, albums, keywords, filters, timeline, map | yes | yes |
| AI content recognition (based on RAM++) | no | yes (optional download) |
| Developer | tone, colour, white balance, detail | all tools, layers, masks, effects, templates, liquify, curves, color correction, background export, Specialized demosaicing for fine detail and low noise |
| PDF export | flattened pages with footer | editable PDF with full JPEG data, JPEG folders |
| Export albums for other programs, watched directories | no | yes |
| File Browser, fotoARRAYRAW, depth AI | no | yes |
fotoARRAY works without subscription and without a cloud service. Unpack the program, start it, open or create a catalog. The catalog is one directory. To move to a new computer, copy the directory (database+thumbnails). The license is bound to your household, not to a login. Windows 10 or 11, 64 bit.
