Thank you Lanzi for these informations.
Infortunately (at least for me) it is reserved to the happy owners of a Mac.
I too have good news, especially for you Frederic. NeoFinder (the former CDfinder) has a Windows version too, formerly called CDwinder, now it is called abeMeda - I don't know why they started renaming them and I even less understand why they keep developing them so much separated instead of calling it the same and making it obvious that they are cross platform with the two versions.
(Correction: in the download section they display there is an app for the other platform - but why they chose this not so obvious method?)You find it at
http://cdwinder.deAs much as I could observe during the years (and the current, rebranded screenshots) they look the same, they feel (roughly) the same and of course they use the same features and catalog files too, so you can use them cross platform. Even use the very same catalog files on a network drive from a PC and a Mac.
I've done part of the cataloging on CDwinder when I still had my old PC with HDDs built into it. And now I still can find files on the very same hard drives that now sit in a locker and I only connect them via a USB adapter to the Mac when some data is needed from them.
It can also be important that they are not too expensive with full or even multi user licences but for a test drive they are completely free yet fully functional and unlimited in time as far as you don't exceed 10 catalogs, what is fairly enough if you have only one or two computers and a handful of external drives. But network drives are not a free/basic feature it requires a licence.
A new catalog is created for each partition you add to the system. So each DVD and hard drive partition is a separate catalog that can be manually added or removed from the program. For example I have a complete catalog of my full archive (each HDD, CD, DVD, everything) and I store the whole catalog set on an external hard drive. Only my mostly used HDD catalogs are allways at hand on my MacBook Air (128GB is limited storage why waste it on CD/DVD disks that I didn't even touch in years). If I don't find something I can attach the external drive and switch to the whole set and start a new search.
Of course you can search the catalogs with the drives offline to find out what storage to find on the selves and connect, once connected you can click to show the found item in a Finder window or can simply drag+drop for immediate use.
For my home purposes I don't use its previews as mainly I search only by filename or metadata and once the shoot folder is located I browse it with PM for the rest.
But at a paper I worked for I used it as the main DAM with active previews and it worked great without problem. Using it seemed me almost as fast and somewhat more user friendly as the (can I say?) industry standard Canto Cumulus what is really far from it in price tag.
