Movies – My Movie Library

Our list leads off with what is probably the most practical option out there, and most certainly the one with the most bells and whistles that have some kind of pragmatic purpose. My Movie Library allows you to keep track of your entire Blu-Ray, DVD, VHS, or digital copy collection in one quick and simple to navigate place. The interface is extremely clean and simple, and it allows you to access your information without having to hunt for it. Best of all, by working your way through the Add Movie process, My Movie Library will actually find information about your movies from the internet, pulling everything you need from the International Movie Database online. You can sift through your titles by a number of identifiers like title, director, or even IMDb rating, and the program can even launch movies that are saved to your computer right into your favorite media player. When it comes to collection management software, My Movie Library reigns at the top of the list.

Valuables – Record Tracker

Let’s face it – if your valuables are taken from your home, the only way to expect to get them back is to have a database with information about them. You need to know what company made your items, exactly what they looked like, any distinguishing markings they may have had, and even their value. Without such information, authorities will likely be at a loss when it comes to track your things down. By using Record Tracker, you can take a solid step towards protecting your things and being ready for such an emergency. The program allows you to make customizable fields for your collections and lets you arrange entries by category, like jewelry, artwork, firearms, or anything else you might want to catalogue. As one might expect, Record Tracker also provides a field for notes and an image.

Baseball Cards – Sports Card Collector
This one makes the list simply because hobby software deserves more attention than it usually receives. Keeping your collections in line is quite simple, particularly if you hunt down database programs made specifically for your interests. Sports Card Collector, for instance, provides fields for absolutely everything you might want to include about each item in your collection, and even allows you to create customized fields for data. It allows you to browse your catalog by multiple fields, such as player or brand, and again includes space for an image.

All of these programs provide two things – the ease of intelligent cataloguing and the safety of insurance documentation. If you really care about your collection or want to be able to access it as easily as possible, consider finding software that simplifies the task.

The program needs to be run with administrative privileges, at least under Windows 7, as the data cannot be saved otherwise. But that is the only complication that users will encounter with this collection management software.

Explorer Plus provides the four media categories books, movies, music and games each with their own database. Each category is divided into descriptors like author, category and publisher for books or category, manufacturer and platform for games.

The program provides the option to either add items manually to a collection or to perform an online search to find the product. The online search uses keywords, e.g. Team Fortress 2, The Art of Seo or Bioware, to find the items in Amazon’s inventory.

Each matching item will be displayed in a listing with the option to use the information from the selected items to fill out the new item form in the program. The selection can be problematic at times for items that exist multiple times, think of games that have been published for multiple systems. The program will only list the title, manufacturer and asin in the listing.

The data will be added to the form giving the user the option to edit if necessary. A click on the Save link will add the item to the collection-

The program comes with a separate bulk importer which can be used to import multiple items at once to the collection. The importer works similar to the online search option in the main program with the difference that multiple result items can be selected.

Explorer Plus is in an early development stage and it would be nice if the developer would sort out the identification problem in the online search results listing.

The program is available for download at the program’s Codeplex page

The collection software is portable and supports various media types including movies, music, books and applications. Users have the option to either add items manually into their collection or perform a scan of a computer device for items. The latter method is obviously the preferred for large collections as it makes it possible to quickly scan a complete hard drive, removable drive or optical drive for multimedia files.

The items are then placed in the selected category from where they can be edited manually. Not all information are usually filled out automatically. That’s where the update from web mechanism comes into play. The collection software can query several Internet databases like IMDB, Amazon, IGN or Softpedia for information. It is a good idea to remove some databases in the program’s preferences. The first database to be queried in the games section is a French website which will return descriptions in French which is not appropriate for users who do not speak French or prefer their results in English.

It should also be mentioned that the titles are case sensitive which means that a search for warcraft 3 will not yield results while a search for Warcraft 3 will.

The collection software is released as a beta and it sometimes can come to errors and problems. Most errors have been encountered during media scans and Internet database lookups. The software program itself looks very promising and could prove to be a contender in the collection software market. The software developer needs to work on the few quirks and should consider adding an option to launch files directly from the program.

With more than 2000 books and hundreds of CDs and DVDs it would just be a pretty boring process and I don’t want to waste that much time. Libra could be a solution for me. It is a free software that organizes collections offering several features that make it stick out of the masses.

The first is a unique one that I never heard about before. It can use a webcam to scan a barcode and identify the item by itself. No more typing and searching through the results to find the item that you bought. This is really useful.

Libra supports other search options besides keyword searches, those are: UPC, ISBN, EAN and Jan in case the barcode reader can’t be used or the item does not have a barcode which is the case for many of my books that I own.

Libra currently searches six Amazon databases which should be fine for most Books, Games, CDs and DVDs but could pose problems for older items. The search itself is very fast and displays covers as well as information about the item. All items are shown as if they were lying on a bookshelf which is also how they are shown in your collection.

Several other features include a way to keep track of borrowed items, print options, create web pages with your collection, import possibilities for existing collections and xml support.

External Links:

Libra Homepage