loupe
Show it
A site that does the work justice, and the paperwork a show or an open call asks for.
why here
Most catalogues get made twenty years late.
By the time a writer, a curator or a publisher comes asking, the dates are in an old notebook. The installation shots are in a folder nobody can find, and the review is a clipping in a drawer. loupe asks for those things a little at a time, while you still remember them.
Record it
Every title, date, venue and credit you log builds your CV, your labels and your files. Go back to a series from 2011 and it becomes as complete as last month’s.
Keep it
Open the whole catalogue as an archive people can search, and choose who helps you look after it.
presentation
Choose how it looks. Change your mind later.
Galleries drawn for every kind of work, from canvases and cut paper to glass, jewelry and photographs. Decide how much shows at once and whether the order matters. The wall, the frame and the lettering can change whenever you like, and the work never moves.
- Set work in a mat and the page around it becomes the wall, in a color you choose.
- Nothing is baked in. Change any of it afterwards and the gallery changes with it.
- You, as well as the work. An About page with a portrait, your bio, and links above it to all the other parts of your site — see one.
sculpture
Every side of it. Not just the front.
A sculpture photographed all the way round becomes a model your visitors can turn, come closer to and see from above. The model opens from its leading photograph with one click. Click the round button on the picture to try it.
- Made from photographs of the work in the software built for it — RealityScan, Metashape, Apple's Object Capture. loupe keeps the model, checks it and tells you how it will open on a phone.
- It says what it is: a reconstruction, from how many photographs, by whom and with what, under the model itself.
- Shown only when you say so. Each model stays hidden until you turn it on. For more security, show a photo spin instead: the work turns in photographs, with no 3D file anyone could save or print.
the record
Every portfolio host will build you a gallery.
Every portfolio host will build you a gallery.
None of them fills in the form.
An open call wants ten images at a stated long edge, a numbered image list with title, medium, dimensions and year, a statement under five hundred words, and a CV. You have all of it. It is in six places, and two of them are out of date.
loupe keeps the work and the paperwork in the same place, so the second one stops being a separate job. And the record gets better every time you use it.
The work record
Title, medium, dimensions, year, edition: the label every gallery wall already uses. One work can have many photographs, because a sculpture has more than one side. Letters, notebooks and announcements have a place too.
A CV that keeps itself
Log where a body of work was shown: venue, city, dates, solo or group. Your CV, your upcoming events and your past shows all come from that one entry. See an example CV.
The submission packet
Images at the size they asked for, a numbered image list, your statement and your CV. One file, named their way. The afternoon back.
Already captioning in Lightroom, Bridge or Photo Mechanic? loupe reads what your files say and fills in only what’s blank.
- title
- Untitled (Blue Interval)
- medium
- oil on linen
- dimensions
- 120 × 90 cm
- year
- 2025
working with others
When a writer, a publisher or a museum asks, send a link.
The requests that come with being taken seriously are all one request: the right image, the right caption, the right credit, and permission. Answer from the record, not from memory.
- For a writer or an editor. Every work has its own page at an address that won’t change, with its picture, its label and one sentence on what someone may do with it.
- For a publisher or a printer. Gather the works they need in your archive and send the selection as one link. Allow them to take away a copy to look at, or the file to print from at your discretion: your original, never re-encoded, with its label inside.
- For a registrar or a gallery. Every file carries the work’s label inside it: title, maker, date, medium, size, and the work’s own copyright, kept apart from the photograph’s. It arrives already labelled.
- For the people who help you. Bring in an assistant, an archivist or your gallery to work on your catalogue with you. Helpers are free.
the archive
The whole body of work, open to be searched.
Your galleries show the selects. The archive holds everything you’ve chosen to keep, from the first series on, and makes it searchable at your own address.
- Found by what you wrote. Visitors search by title, year, place, medium or any word in your record, and narrow by decade, place, gallery or kind of thing.
- More than pictures. Letters, notebooks and announcements sit beside the work, their pages in order and their words searchable.
- Only what a wall label shows. Prices, the names of people pictured and your file names never appear. Before it opens, you go through every place named in your record and hide any a stranger shouldn’t find.
- Nothing leaves unless you say so, gallery by gallery.
- Your site can open on it. Make the archive your site’s front page, and visitors arrive at its search.
- search the collection
- place:"Valle Crucis"
- holds
- 4,812 works · 61 galleries
- years
- 1994–2026
for the long run
Choose who helps you look after the work.
Name a steward: someone you trust with it, such as a son or daughter, a former student, a studio assistant or a foundation. They need no account and pay nothing. loupe lets them know they’ve been named and keeps them in the loop, so the work never rests with one person alone.
When you’re ready to stop adding, whether to step back from showing, close a chapter or hand the catalogue on, it can be kept: open, searchable and unchanged, for $50 a year per ten thousand photographs. Pick it up again whenever you like.
what you keep
Type it once. It leaves with the file.
Everything you record about a work is written into the photograph itself as standard IPTC and XMP — not only into our database. Download your files and open them in Lightroom, Bridge or anything you use next: your titles, your media, your descriptions are already there.
- We never re-encode a photograph. The metadata is replaced in place and every other byte is copied through untouched.
- Your own keywords and ratings survive — we merge into what your tools wrote, never over it.
- The export is not a paid feature and never will be. Work that cannot leave is work you have lent us.
loupe isn’t a backup, and it shouldn’t hold your only copy. Make a copy to keep from your account page regularly, and keep your masters, the scans and the finished files made from them, on your own storage. What to keep says where each file belongs.
stanza
Rooms for your pictures and your words, together — from a single line to a whole photo essay, from one picture to a series.
A companion to loupe, with tools of its own for building stunning web pages featuring your images. stanza is included with loupe membership, at no extra charge. On its own, it is $60 a year.
What stanza gives you
- Rooms set in fifty-one moves; a room can be a page of your site, or your Home.
- The composer, an easy-access writing desk designed for writers, that keeps track of versions and every word you cut, your type set as you choose. see it ↗
- Everything you write, organized: one search across every poem, draft and cut line; collections to sort them into; and at a glance, what you’ve written and where it has appeared.
- Share any poem or room as images or a video to post, with tools that ensure it comes across as you intend. see it ↗
- Word and PDF of anything you write, and a book manuscript set as contests ask.
- Readings: your voice reading your poems, your images with documentary-style movement beneath them.
- Private until you’re ready, shared with the readers you choose, or with everyone.
Three rooms made in stanza: pictures by Todd Stabley, words by Walt Whitman.
see stanza ↗
what it costs
One plan. No tiers to read.
A site and a record, in one place, for less than either, and stanza is included with membership, at no extra charge. Every template, every page and the copy of everything you keep are on every plan — the price buys space, your own name, and the deliverables. Space is counted two ways, photographs and the size of your files, and your account page shows both; whichever fills first is when you add a block of space. Which file to send, and what to keep somewhere else, is in What to keep.
free
$0
One gallery on your site, fifty photographs and 5 GB, a loupe address, every template and every page — and the archive, open to be searched at your address, on this plan as on every other. Enough to put one real body of work on the internet and see how it looks. The loupe mark stays, quietly.
member
$120 / year
stanza is included, at no extra charge. On its own, it is $60 a year.
Or $14 a month. Every gallery on your site, five thousand photographs and 150 GB, your own domain, a press kit, and a way back to your catalogue as it was on any day of the last month.
more space
$50 / year
Ten thousand more photographs, up to 300 GB more, each time you add one, for the artist whose whole archive lives here. Add a block of space when the meter says so, never before.
A catalogue that’s complete can be closed to changes: open and searchable, nothing added or edited. You pay for the storage alone: $50 a year for each ten thousand photographs.
Your own type and logo, two faces you hold the licence for and a logo where your name stands, is $30 a year more. Have a code? There is a box for it at checkout. Helpers, such as an assistant, an archivist or your gallery, are free.
A visitor’s browser talks to your site and nowhere else: the type is served from it, and nothing on it calls Google. Your work leaves with its record attached, on any plan, any day. Nothing is deleted when your plan changes; a catalogue on Free that holds more than Free’s space keeps everything for a year — three years for an archive with a steward — and we write to you before anything goes. Our long-term promise says the rest.
Twenty years from now, someone will ask where this was shown.
Write it down while you remember.