Moving your gallery off ArtCloud, ITGallery, or spreadsheets

Switching the system that runs your inventory feels risky, and that fear keeps a lot of galleries paying for software they have outgrown. It is a reasonable fear — but a migration done in the right order is far less dramatic than it looks. Here is how to move off ArtCloud, ITGallery, Artlogic, or a pile of spreadsheets without losing anything that matters.

First, decide what you are actually moving

Inventory is more than a list of titles. A complete record of a work usually includes: artist, title, year, medium and technique, dimensions (and framed dimensions), edition details, price, status, location, provenance and notes, and — easy to forget — the images. Before exporting anything, write down which of these your current system holds and which you actually rely on. You will use that list to check the migration later.

Get a clean export

Most platforms can export to CSV or Excel, and most can produce an image set or at least image URLs. Pull both. A few things to watch:

• Dimensions are often stored as free text ("30 x 40 cm framed"), not structured numbers. Decide whether you want them parsed into height/width or kept as-is.
• Edition information hides in different fields depending on the platform — sometimes in the medium line itself ("lithograph, 12/50").
• Images are the part people underestimate. Exporting a spreadsheet is easy; getting every high-resolution image, in order, matched to the right work, is the real job.

If your platform has no clean export — or actively makes leaving difficult — that is itself a reason to leave, but it means the image side will take more care.

Map fields before you import, not after

The single most common migration mistake is importing first and fixing later. Map the columns from your old export to the new system's fields before you load anything: which column is the title, which is the medium, where edition lives, how status values translate. A clear map turns a messy import into a boring, predictable one.

Translations deserve a note here. If you sell to more than one market, the title and medium may need to exist in several languages. Artist names never get translated — a name is a proper noun. Titles often shouldn't either, except for generic ones like "Untitled". Decide your language policy during mapping, not as an afterthought.

Check the first import with your own eyes

Never trust a migration you haven't spot-checked. Pick ten works — a mix of simple and complicated ones, ideally including an edition and a framed piece — and verify every field against the original after import. Did the images come across in the right order? Did the framed dimensions survive? Is the price in the right currency? Ten careful checks will surface ninety percent of systematic problems, because migration errors are almost always patterns, not one-offs.

Keep the old system read-only for a while

Don't cancel the old subscription the day the import finishes. Downgrade it, freeze it, keep it as a read-only reference for a billing cycle or two. Once you've published from the new system, fulfilled a sale through it, and produced a catalogue or export you trust, then you cancel — and stop paying twice.

How we handle it

At Percalo, migration help is included on every plan, not sold as an add-on, because a migration that goes wrong is a customer who leaves. We take your export from ITGallery, ArtCloud, Artlogic, Artwork Archive, Shopify, or any CSV/Excel — photos, dimensions, medium, edition, prices — map it with you, and check the first import together before you rely on it. The system of record becomes yours, fully exportable, the day you're ready.

Moving is not the gamble it feels like. Done in order — export, map, check, retire — it's just careful work, and it ends with you no longer paying for the tool you were trying to leave.