Manage your movie collection with Coollector
Keeping track of all the movies and videos that you own can be a tedious task especially if you lend movies to friends and relatives, and have quite a few of them in your collection.
I'm someone who does not buy lots of movies and if I do I normally only buy them if they have been reduced in price which means that I'm not a likely candidate to organize my movie collection.
A friend of mine on the other hand has literally thousands of movies and I would think that it could become awfully hard to keep track of the whole collection.
Keeping track can be important for a number of reasons. It is useful to check if you already own a movie before you buy it. If you have a couple, you may be able to keep an overview of your collection easily, but if you have hundreds of even thousands, it may not be possible anymore.
It is also useful if you are lending movies to others and want to keep an overview of those activities.
Coollector tries to assist you by providing an interface to organize and manage movie collections. The program concentrates on English movies but can be used to include foreign releases as well. It requires more manual work though to add those.
Each of the more than 119,000 movies is listed with information about actors, plot, genre, directors and release versions and it only takes a click to add one of the movies to a movie collection. The information are taken from the Internet Movie Database.
Each movie detail can be edited before it is added to the collection. The main way of finding movies is by using the build in search which can find movies and people right away.
Movies and people are always selectable,, and when you click on them you are taken to the main page of the movie or the movies that the person was part of. The database is in no way as comprehensive as that of IMDB for example but it does find most movies.
Filters can be added to exclude certain formats from being included in search results. A user could for instance exclude Blu-Ray and UMD results if he does not own a player for these.
Movies can be rated and added to a wish, loaned and ordered list. The Piclens extension is required to view movie covers or previews on YouTube.
Update: The most recent version of the application supports TV shows. One interesting feature is that it will display all actors of a show on a single page, making it very easy to find additional movies and shows the actor stared in.
Verdict
Coollector ships with many interesting features. What I really like about it is that you can use it to discover new movies or TV shows. This can be done by clicking on actor names or searching for directors among other things.
It is really useful if you have a large collection, or just want to keep track of movies you are interested in thanks to the built-in wishlist feature.
Coollector is trying to be an offline IMDb of sorts, as it comes with a huge “encyclopedia” of movie/media info, which I think is a dumb idea if you’re just looking to “Manage your movie collection”.
When I want to “discover” media, I just use the web, with ALL the resources it offers for that. And compared to that, Coollector is limited and bloated.
As for organizing my local media, I want my database to only have info for MY media, and Coollector is NOT good for that, as that bloated “encyclopedia” is useless and just gets in my way.
But if you don’t have web access and want an offline version of IMDb for browsing movies that you can’t watch, then Coollector is a good for that.
That said, if you want software like Coollector but without that “encyclopedia”, then EMDB or Kodi are the best choices.
If you need a media manager with a server, then Plex and Emby are best for that.
Please allow me to report that the program has enormously improved since this review, and it’s now available for Mac too. It’s not free anymore, but there’s currently a 62% Christmas discount on softpedia.com
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Softpedia-Exclusive-Discount-62-Off-Coollector-316860.shtml
@ghacks.net: kudos for discovering my program and spreading the word ! Thank you very much !!
I’ve over long time used a program called “GCStar”
It works well on both my Windows & Ubuntu.
But this might just be better, I’ll look into this one when I get home from work!
This is so cool and fun. I feel like a small Blockbuster affiliate. Thanks Martin!