Starting your first collection

The hard part is not the tool, it is deciding where your collection stops.

In MyCataLog, a collection carries a single category, chosen from 22 categories ranging from vinyl records to bottle caps, by way of books, coins, figurines and trading cards. If nothing fits, the « Other » category is always available.

That choice is not cosmetic: it decides which fields the form will offer you for each item. A vinyl collection opens artist, album, label, revolutions per minute and tracklist fields. A book collection opens author, pages, publisher, language, genre, illustrator, format and collection. A figurine collection opens character, series, material, height in centimetres, manufacturer and licence. You are never required to fill them in, but they will only be offered if the category provides for them.

The beginner's temptation is to create one catch-all collection holding everything they own. That is the surest way never to finish it, and never to be able to sort it usefully. A collection is worth more the sharper its boundary is: « my jazz vinyl » can be catalogued, sorted and shared, « my stuff » cannot be catalogued at all.

So start small, and start deliberately. Take the shelf you know best, the one whose contents you could half recite from memory. You will immediately see which fields matter to you, and you will end up with one complete collection rather than 3 half-filled ones.

If you collect several unrelated things, they deserve separate collections. That is also what will let you make one public and keep the other to yourself.

Creating a collection takes 3 things: a name, a category, and an optional description. Plus and Premium subscriptions add a cover image.

Every new collection is created private. That is deliberate: you fill it first, you publish later, if you want to. Visibility is set afterwards, from the collection's information panel, and 3 modes exist.

Private: you are the only one who sees it. This is the default state, and it is a perfectly viable state for life. Many collectors catalogue for themselves, for their insurer or for their heirs, and never share anything.

Public: the collection becomes shareable through a link, and it appears on your public profile as well as in the community space.

Friends only: only your friends see the collection, through the share link.

There is one rule worth knowing before you have 200 items rather than after. A collection can only become public, or visible to your friends, if every single one of its items has at least one image. As long as a single item has no photo, the visibility menu stays locked, and a counter tells you how many items are affected. This is not a display preference, it is enforced by the server.

The reason is simple: a public collection is a shop window, and a window with holes in it does its owner no favours. The practical consequence is just as simple, photograph as you go. The add form already requires an image, so the problem almost never comes from manual entry. It comes from spreadsheet imports, where rows arrive with no photo. If you think you might publish one day, treat the photo as part of the entry, not as a finishing touch to be done later across 300 items.

Only 2 things are required to create an item: a name, and at least one image. Everything else is optional.

You can attach up to 6 images per item, in png, jpg, jpeg and webp format, up to 10 MB per file. Your files are kept exactly as you sent them, with no recompression and no resizing. For photos that identify the item and prove its condition, see the guide Photographing your collectibles well.

The fields shared by every category cover the essentials: a serial number, assigned automatically if you leave it blank, a description, the item's condition from new to damaged by way of lightly used, worn and restored, rarity from common to limited , a rating out of 5 stars , a purchase price with its currency, and 2 dates that should not be confused. The origin date belongs to the item, the year it was pressed or struck. The acquisition date is when it came into your hands. The two sort independently, and that is precisely why they are separate.

The Ownership field deserves a note of its own. An item is owned by default, but you can mark it as soon to be owned or not owned. That is what lets you keep a wishlist and track incoming orders in the same collection as the items you actually hold, without distorting your counts.

One piece of advice that holds for everything that follows: do not try to fill in everything on your first item. Instead, pick 2 or 3 fields you will fill in systematically, for every item, without exception. A field filled half the time is worth nothing: you will not be able to sort or filter on it reliably, and you will never know whether an item is missing from the screen because it does not match the filter or because its field is empty. Consistency beats completeness.

If you are starting from an existing spreadsheet, Excel and CSV import is available from the free account onwards, up to 1000 rows per import. Just remember that imported items arrive without images, and that they will therefore block publication of the collection until you have photographed them. The steps and the traps to avoid are covered in the guide Import your collection from an Excel or CSV spreadsheet.

As long as a collection fits on one screen, its order does not matter. Past 100 items or so, organisation is what separates a catalogue from a pile. The guide Organizing a large collection goes further.

Three layers stack up. Search, to find an item whose name you know. Filters, to keep only part of the collection on screen, by ownership, condition, rarity, rating, purchase price or dates. Sorts , which stack: you can sort by descending rarity then by rating, and the order in which you add them matters. By default, items appear from newest to oldest.

Your sorts and filters are saved on the collection. You set them once, and you find your view again on every visit.

Bulk editing is the tool to know about on the day you change your mind about your method. It applies a new value to several fields at once, across the items on screen, so across the result of your filters. That is how you retrofit a field you decided to start using too late, without opening 200 records one by one. It cannot be undone, and a confirmation tells you the exact number of items affected before it is applied.

When a collection grows too broad, 2 actions let you split it without starting over. An item can be moved to another collection . And a collection can serve as a template for a new one: the new one inherits the name, description, category, sorts and filters of the original, and it is created empty and private. So you do not have to reconfigure your view every time you break out a series.

From the Plus subscription onwards, Excel export reflects the filters and the sort you have on screen. That is useful for an insurance claim, an inventory to print, or simply to keep a copy of your work somewhere other than the application. What it contains, and what it does not, is explained in the guide Export your collection to Excel.