I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. The kinds of things we recommend here are things I would be delighted to find under the tree. But now it’s too late to go out and get something. Here’s a gift you can send in seconds and any movie fan on your list will be grateful. Usually we stick to movies and home theater equipment when we do talk about gifts here at Upcomingdiscs. However, I do keep my eye out for things that might be of special appeal to the film collectors in our audience. If you’re at all like me, you’ve been trying new ways to keep track of your video collection for years. I have stuff on so many formats that it gets pretty tough to find a way to keep it all together and easy to access. Most of the time I used to just work with Works database options and let that be my database. But a few years ago I’ve finally found a commercial database that does everything I want it to do, and a ton more. I’m talking about Collectorz, and they’ve been helping to organize my film collection for a few years now. We talked about them last Christmas, and I’m here to talk about them again. This thing rocks and is about as easy to use as anything else I’ve ever tried. It keeps track of everything you need.
The database works in conjunction with the internet resources like the IMDB. When you enter a film title it automatically searches these various resources for the film you entered. Once it finds the movie it populates all kinds of fields for you. It grabs the cast, year, genre, director, trailers and cover art and so much more all automatically. The information is incorporated into your database and permanently recorded. There’s no need to have access to the internet to open up and browse these features once the database is entered. You can even scan the barcode if you have a barcode reader for your computer.
You also have plenty of fields in which you can enter your own information. You can rate the film and sort films by your own rating. You can enter the format you own the film on and also sort accordingly. You can, of course, edit any of the data at any time. It’s easy to make backups, and the whole thing takes up surprisingly little space, including cover art. There can be links added to trailers or photo galleries. You can customize your own fields, and you can edit the fields that already exist.
When it comes to organizing your database, you have several printable options. You can create text or PDF files in several formats to make it easy to print or send your list to someone else. More important you can upload your collection to an online version that synchs with your database. Now you can share your database with others by merely sending a link. Bang it here to see my HD/4K library and get an idea of all that you can do with this thing: Gino’s Movie Library. See for yourself what you can do here. Trust me. I’ve tried every movie database out there. I’ve tried to have my wife write one for me from scratch. I’ve tried to modify other databases to suite my purposes here. This is hands down the best one I’ve tried. So check my database out, and then sign up for your own by clicking on the graphic to the right. Or just bang it here.
The big news for this last year is the ap version you can use on your phone or tablet. When you update to the 5.2 version you are going to put a lot of power into your device and your film collection. The “infographic” screen gives you a ton of statistics about your movie collection. It’s a must have for us here at Upcomingdiscs because the more ways we can organize and analyze our collection the more efficiently we can work. We get in up to 450 titles a year and it can be a nightmare to organize. It was until we got this database working for us. Now the “infographic” gives you a breakdown of formats and television versus film. You can enjoy your data in a easy to read pie chart. My favorite are the bar charts that can give you collection breakdowns on genre and even directors. The database has also kept up with the UHD/4K movement. This is another key for us. We have to be on top of the latest technological fields like HDR, Dolby Vision, bonus features and edition details. You count on us for just those things. How do we keep on top of it all? We use Collectorz movie database. So should you.
