Changelog

Part of keeping an inventory of works is tracking their provenance, which includes events where they’ve been displayed. Whether on solo or group exhibitions, art fair booths, online viewing rooms, grant or residency applications, or elsewhere.

Valise now supports tracking this information in a first-class way with a new Presentations section. You can now record the venue, title, dates, and more information about any show, upload related images and documents, and connect artworks in your vault.

Try it out by adding a presentation to your vault.

Valise lets you track sales for individual or sets of artworks. Until today, the only way to access that information was to open the artwork itself and find the sale record.

If you needed to review your sales in aggregate — maybe to answer questions like “how much did I earn from sales in 2022?” or “which of my galleries sold the most works” — it required more manual work than it should have.

Well no more! As of today, you can now see all your sales in one place and filter them by date, buyer, seller, amount, and more.

To give it a spin, open up the sales page in your vault.

Valise now supports tracking artists for artworks. This is a new feature that’s useful for artists who frequently work with collaborators, or collectors tracking works by multiple artists.

Since most Valise users only track their own works, by default, all new artworks are assigned to their vault’s contact information. If your vault name is Alice Chen, all new artworks you create will have Alice Chen as the sole artist. That name will appear in your artwork-view pages and in collection preview links shared with others.

If you’d like to opt-out of automatically assigning yourself as the artist, toggle the “Default Artists” setting on your vault settings page.

When signing up you may have chosen a name like Alice Chen Studio, which leads to that phrase appearing throughout Valise. We recommend naming your vault after yourself. You can update your vault name on your vault settings page.

When tracking information about your works, you’ll inevitably want to keep track of the people and organizations you work with too: who are these works consigned to? Who bought these works? What photographer took these documentation photos?

Contacts are a way to keep a handle on all this information. Contacts act as a single home for any information about a person or organization, referenced throughout your vault.

You can create a contact as you’re creating a consignment, or recording a sale. Once you’ve done so, it’ll autocomplete for future consignments or sales.

If you want to edit or delete contacts, you can do so from the Contact Settings page.

And to keep things organized, you can assign contacts one or more roles, which determine where we show them to you. So you won’t see buyers suggested when you’re creating a consignment, but you’ll see them when you’re recording a sale. If you want to change which roles a contact has, you can do so from the Contact Settings page.

For all the details, read our contact docs page

Until recently, if you wanted to navigate between two artworks, you either had to go back to the artwork index or use the search. This was a bit of a pain, especially if you were using filters to narrow down artworks, because those filters would be lost every time you navigated somewhere else.

We’ve introduced two changes to make this much easier:

• Filters now persist for your entire session, so you can click into an artwork page and then return without losing your place.
• You can use the new arrow navigation in the top-right corner of the artwork page to quickly navigate between artworks. You can also use j and k to navigate left and right, respectively. (These are the same shortcuts as Gmail and other apps.)

What’s more, when navigating to subsequent and previous artworks, we’ll only show you the artworks that match your current filters.

This makes it easy to filter down to a subset of works that need edits and then quickly navigate between only those works. For example, if you’re adding location information to every artwork that’s missing it, you can filter by Location → Is Not Set, pick the first artwork, and then work your way through the list with j and k.

We’ve now added support for displaying HEIC and TIFF images in Valise. We hope this makes it easier for you to quickly add documentation of your works directly from your iPhone or working files.

TIFF (.tiff) is an older image format that’s useful for storing lossless image data.

HEIC (.heic or .heif) is a new image format that’s designed to have a smaller file size with higher quality. Since iOS 11, most photos taken on an iPhone are saved as HEIC files.

Web browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox don’t natively support displaying these image formats. This means you often need to convert these images to different format before you can upload them to apps.

Valise now supports uploading and displaying these formats like any other image type. And we do this without any changes to the raw data you upload to us, so when you request an export of your data from Valise, you’ll get back the original unmodified TIFF or HEIC image.

You can now apply tags to artworks. This is a great way to organize your artwork and make it easier to find.

We’ve seen early users of this feature use it to group artworks by medium (e.g., painting vs. sculpture), add status information (e.g., “unsigned”), or add collaborators’ names.

To add a tag to an artwork, go to the artwork page and click on the tags field. You’ll be prompted to search existing tags or create a new one.

On the Artworks page, you can filter by tags to find every artwork with a specific tag.

You can now create new vaults to help organize your work or collaborate with others.

When you first join Valise, you’ll be prompted to name your first vault. After signing up, you can create additional vaults in the top-left corner of the dashboard.

You can invite others to join your vault from your settings page. For more details, see our help docs.

As a part of this change, you can also delete a vault you no longer need from the settings page. To be safe, we’ll notify all owners of the vault and wait 72 hours before deleting it.

Valise is still in beta and is currently free to use. However, when we turn on billing, we’ll require each vault to be a separate subscription, so keep that in mind as you structure your work.

One of the biggest benefits of cloud-based software is that it’s someone else’s job to keep your data backed up and safe. However, this is also the biggest downside: oftentimes, you don’t have access to your own data, can’t keep backups yourself, and can have a hard time migrating to other tools.

We want Valise to be different—we want our users to be able to leave at any point in time, without feeling locked in. To support that, we’ve added a data-export feature to Valise.

From the Import/Export Settings page, you can get a full export of all the data you’ve given us at the click of a button.

After requesting an export, within a few minutes you’ll receive an email with a link to download the export. It’s a .zip file that includes your artworks, consignments, and sales, plus all the images and files you’ve uploaded to Valise in their original size and resolution.

For more details, see our help docs.

Valise now supports editioned artworks. After creating an artwork, you can set up editions for it.

You can specify the number of editions (up to a maximum of 100) and the number of Artist Proofs (APs) for each edition. For example, 3+2AP.

Once an artwork is editioned, each edition will have its own location and status fields, and sales and consignments will be associated with specific editions rather than the whole artwork.

Learn more in our help article about editioned artworks.

We have recently completed a number of smaller improvements and fixes while we work on the next big features:

• Added a new Profile Settings page for editing user settings (which are distinct from team settings).
• Added support for zooming in to uploaded images on artwork pages. Tap on an image to see it in high resolution and tap again to close.
• Search now returns 20 results instead 10.
• Fixed an issue where search results were matching unrelated words.
• Fixed an issue where edits made to collections were not being synced properly and might have shown outdated information on artwork pages.
• Fixed artwork sorting ambiguity: previously when “title” or “year” was selected, duplicate titles or years would sort in an arbitrary order. Now, they will fall back to sorting by ID.

You are now able to keep track of expenses for an individual artwork in Valise.

This is useful to keep track of framing, shipping, and production costs that arise during the production of an artwork. In some gallery relationships, you’ll be reimbursed for these expenses. And even if you’re not, having a record of expenses can be useful to negotiate better rates with vendors, and to understand the true cost of producing your work.

Read more in our artwork expenses guide.

You can now edit the display of your collections, toggling between a grid or list view.

And you can now reorder your collections by dragging and dropping them into the order you want. This can be helpful when preparing for a show or refining the private preview you’re sending to galleries or collectors.

Large file uploads will now show a progress bar to give you a sense of when the upload will complete.

Collections can now be privately shared with a secret link. You can also set a link expiry date to automatically disable the link after a certain day.

When recording a sale, you can now record prices for each individual artwork. We’ll calculate the total price for the sale, and any discount percentages if applicable. After creation, you can see this info later on the sale’s page.

Valise will now auto-generate unique IDs for artworks. You can customize the prefix and numbers behind these IDs at any time. Then, next time you add an artwork, Valise will automatically generate the next ID in the sequence.

Read more in our Artwork ID docs.

We just added support for tracking basic sale information. You can now record a sale for multiple artworks, and track the sale price, date, and buyer information.

You can now filter artworks on the artworks page by title, year, status, and location.

On this day, we started working on Valise in earnest. Thanks for scrolling all the way back here!