Cataloguing your Collection Part 2
Cataloguing Your Collection: Commercial Software
6 Feb 2007
My personal collection has been catalogued on a "homemade" Excel spreadsheet for the past five years.
Because I am worried I have a lot of duplicate items, I decided it is time to re-organize my collection. The Excel spreadsheet is nice, but as long as I'm at it, I'd like to put everything into a more suitable format.
This article is based on my experiences trying some of the commercially available software, and I will update it as I experiment with various softwares before I select the one I ultimately want to use.
The first software I considered was Collectify. Their website is gorgeous, and has impressive big name endorsements from Sothebys and Chubb. It is a museum type cataloguing system, based on the "Getty" system of identification (which means absolutely nothing to me, but golly, does it sound good). It appears to be highly customizable, and you can run a plethora of reports, create catalogues, inventories for insurance purposes, even lists of items you've loaned to museums (!!!!), and lists of which beneficiary gets what when you kick off (I am secretly snickering at the thought of leaving my Gollum liter bottle to my heirs. I'm sure they'll thank me.)
The software itself reminds reminds me of the insurance software I've been wedded to for the past ten years, which might be why it's gotten Chubb's seal of approval. I don't like it that the images are so small in the layout. Doggone it, if I'm going to go through the staggering effort to catalogue my stuff, I'd like to LOOK at my treasures, not have a thumbnail view.
I did not download this software to test. It does not appear to do anything more than the less expensive ones, and frankly, seemed like overkill. When I'm ready to catalogue my Van Goghs, though, I'll give 'em a buzz.
You can view their website at: http://www.collectify.com/index.php I do love their suggestion about cataloguing your collection slowly, to enjoy it all over again. Where's my champagne glass and chocolate box? And Sven, my Swedish masseuse to ease my weary knots as I hunker over my computer, voluptuously re-enjoying my collection?
The next software I tested was Collection Master by Novato Technology. The price is $39.95, and it is available via download or by mail on CDrom.There is a free 30 day trial.
I admit, I am shallow. I was drawn in by the very nice, very professional website. I assumed the software would be the same, but found I did not like this software.
It was not searchable enough for my purposes, and there was a warning not to make folders too large, or it would interfere with operation of the software. So my collection would have to be subdivided by type of item, rendering searches even more difficult. The folders are set up in a 'tree" fashion. This software reminds me very much of Ebay's Turbolister software in the way you set it up and organize items. I have always had a problem organizing Turbolister, as I find myself constantly putting stuff in the wrong folder by mistake. If it is indeed like Turbolister, I can see it getting slower and slower as the number of items increases, too. It may not be anything like Turbolister at all, but that was my first and firmest impression, and it just put me off.
Furthermore, it was scarily easy to delete an item by mistake, which I did on my second or third item. I set up the item again, as a test, and found out it was indeed easy to delete an item (even an entire folder) with a single misstroke of the keyboard. That kind of put the nix on it for me.
However, it was relatively easy to set up and intuitive to use.
Finally, I was disappointed that I emailed them with a question, and a week (update...now a month) later had still not received a response, so I suspect their "support" is somewhat lacking. http://www.nortica.com/
Next, I turned my attention to Collectibles Organizer Deluxe. Again, a free 30 days trial, with the $75 software available via download or snail mail.
Collectibles Organizers Deluxe website is uninformative. The screenshots are just awful, and their "tour" gave little of the information I was seeking. The instructions to set this software up are very limited, and the training guide is incomplete. However, once you figure it out (it took me a couple of hours), it is highly customizable, and you can add unlimited images (although you have to pre-set this up when you create your customized template. I set up 12 images, which will take care of 98% of my items.)
This software is a bit more searchable. It is a LOT more stable than the Novato software. There is a setting so you cannot delete an item without specifically typing the word "YES" in a box and confirming again. All my items can be kept in one "folder", which vastly improves searchability. Beware, though, while getting the hang of the software, it is easy to accidentally overtype an item, which is pretty much the same thing as deleting it.
Adding items is quick, and adding images is very easy. You can set up a page template for similar items (Toybiz, Topps). It will take you a moment to figure out how to use the template, though.
I particularly like it that I can right click an image and it takes me straight to Paintshop Pro so I can enlarge the images to view details, and email or manipulate them, etc. I wish it would give me the image location, but I can pull that off Paintshop Pro, so that's not a crisis.
I also give major kudos to this vendor. I emailed with a question in the morning, and had a polite, pleasant response in my inbox by the time I got home from work. It's a little pricey, but overall, a nice software, as long as you have the patience to sit down and figure it out.
http://www.primasoft.com/tour_collect/collectibles_software_tour01.htm
The next software I tried was the Frostbow Collection Manager 2:
http://frostbow.com/products/collection_manager.shtml
The software is reasonably priced at $24.95, and downloads in a heartbeat, with a free 30 day free available, too.
One unexpected oddity about this software is, it downloads and saves as a document file, rather than placing an icon on your desktop. I "lost" it, and could not find it again, and had to re-download it, this time making a note of where it was putting itself.
The website and Help screens are very uninformative, but this is a very simple program to operate. It was pretty intuitive to set up, and seems to be moderately customizable.
Pictures are very easily attached to the software, although a bit sloppy to save,unless I've overlooked something. I am very disappointed it only permits two images to be attached. But, if your images are scan files (versus photos), you may be able to attach a multi-page scan as a single image.
The pictures are easy to open, and you can manipulate and save them elsewhere easily. There is a sort of basic photo manip software included, which reminds me of the popular Irfanview software, which you can download for free. You can also store images in a number of pre-set sizes, which I really liked, and it automatically sized my images to fit the window.
I do not like it that it does not indicate where the photo is stored on your computer, but, I suppose, if you set the photo up properly, you may not need to have it stored elsewhere. You cannot email the photo out of Frostbow, which is something I am often called upon to do, when someone emails me with a question. But, it would be possible to easily open an image, and then store the image in a temporary folder to be emailed, so this is inconvienient, but not a crisis.
There is a very basic search, but appears to be a filter that may narrow the search criteria, although it is a little awkward to use (but not half as awkward as looking for a particular set of cards, for example, and having to scroll through hundreds of them.)
It is not as easy to accidentally delete or overwrite an item (or entire database) as the other softwares I have looked at.
There is a lot of unnecessary duplication of buttons. This is a very simple software to use, and there is no need to clutter up the screen by adding some of the buttons that are seldom used and belong in the taskbar. But still, far fewer buttons than the other softwares I reviewed, which gives the screens a cleaner appearance.
There is a large box available for comments and descriptions. The box is not searchable via the search function.
There are umpteen different reports you can run, but most seem to be various price/value related spreadsheets for values, price paid, insurance purposes, etc. In my personal experience, this is a waste of time for large collections, since values fluctuate so often. You'd never be able to keep up with it. I used to, and finally deleted that column from my current spreadsheet. When I do choose a more professional software, I will not bother keeping up with values.
This software does not create HTML like some of the other softwares, so can't be used to create webpages.
If it weren't for the two image limit, this software would get a thumbs up. I have emailed support to see if there is a workaround, but have not heard from them.
It was the least expensive, at $14.95, and allows a 30 day trial period.
I'm afraid this is a case of "you get what you pay for". This would probably be a decent software for a dabbler with a bunch of small collections.
It is slightly customizable (you can rename the fields but not change their original alpha or numberic use, and cannot delete unecessary fields.) Maddeningly, a quarter of the screen is an ugly, eye-numbing green box requiring useless (in my categories) information, and nearly half the rest of the item screen is given over to the address of the person you purchased the item from. Ugh! Now I don't know about you, but, generally, when I add something to my collection, it's mine, Preciousss, all mine, and I don't care or need to keep the seller or trader's email or snail mail address.
These fields are laid out in a mailing label type format, so even if you change the field name from, say, "Street name" to something else, it still looks like an address format, which is kind of wierd. There are also other fields you can't change. For example, you can rename the date field, but you still have to enter a date in it. You can't change it to accept any other information.
Also, all the other softwares would "collect" frequently used terms and then creat convenient drop-down boxes, i.e. for a Toybiz figure, you just type "To" and the field defaults to Toybiz. This one does not do that, which is a pity, because not only is feature that a huge time saver, but it also forces you to stay organized and consistent. It prevents you from calling something Toybiz one time and then calling it Toy-Biz several hundred items later. This compromises both search and sort functions.
It took me a while to figure out how to add photos. You can do unlimited photos tolerably easily and quickly once you figure out the photos attach in a drop down box, not by the sideways arrows. Very confusing.
A slip of a finger on this software, and you could easily delete an entire collection, when you only intended to delete a single item. But, this is not the only software with this problem. I cannot believe that the software designers put buttons for such a function in with buttons that are used frequently. A "delete this collection" button should be hard to find, so you don't "find" it the hard way.
With some minor tweaking this could be an outstanding collectibles management software, but as is, is unappealing for cataloguing this type of collection.
1 Jul 2007
This is just a quick review of two additional cataloguing softwares I have tested.
The first is Treasuresoft at www.treasuresoft.com
Cost is $9.99, if paid via Paypal, somewhat more if you request a CDrom. Email address on their website for support is incorrect, which ticked me off immensely from the get-go. Furthermore, you must save each item umpteen times as you go along. It was very simple, which appealed to me, but to my horror, was not saving any information. First two email inquiries bounced (due to the wrong link on their website) and I finally emailed them via Ebay which elicited a quick response, but the reply was insulting, as if I was too stupid to understand how to use a basic software.
Now, I am pretty much self taught computer wise, and I may not know the "lingo", but dammit, I do have a clue. I have set up a multi-user network at my insurance agency by myself, installed umpteen software packages, taught everyone in my agency how to use them, figured out Tagbot on my own
( a crowning achievement, I might add), and have successfully manipulated photos and spreadsheets for years. Just one of my SD camera cards indicate I'm up to about 43,000 photos, if that gives you an idea.
This software was so simple, very few customization options, it should have worked like a charm, but it was just beyond me. I spent probably twenty hours trying to make this thing work, and never could figure out how to save items. $9.99 utterly wasted, I don't even have the energy to request a refund at this point.
It might have been a Vistas issue, but I did the roll-back to XP for this particular software, tried running it both as Administrator and not, and it still would not save items, so I don't think it was Vistas.
A complete thumbs down on this one.
The last commercial software I tried was Collection Studio 1.38 www.collectionstudio.com/en/ They have a 10 day free trial download so you can sample their wares.
This one was intriguing. According to their website, it had just been revamped and updated as of early June 2007, so I had high expectations this one would be completely current and bug-free.
Not.
Absolutely no customer support. I emailed twice over the course of the week I tested it, with nary a response. Instructions are in pidgen English (I think the developer may be Russian). Difficult to use, not customizable, and once I reached 130 items, would flat out lock up my system every time I went to save the files.
To be fair, I tried to customize this one as much as possible, which wasn't much, being forced to choose to call my LOTR collection "Books" (the closest matching caption) and rename some of the changeable fields, but that shouldn't have made a difference, since I was still working within the bounds of their software. LOVED the drag and drop feature. If I were a stamp, coin, or book collector, this would be just the ticket, assuming that the Save problem can be overcome.
Thankfully, it was a free download, so cost me only time and frustration.
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Collecting Lord of the Rings Press Kits