posted 11-29-2015 07:23 PM            

Hello,

I have been reading this forum for years so I thought it was time I registered and posted an intro.

I'm an accountant and sometimes silver dealer in Texas. My collecting interest range between Arts & Crafts and Mid Century American sterling hollowware.

I have a small side business where I help people who are downsizing find new owners for their silver and objects of high value. I've also been asked to speak about silver at local events, and I've volunteered for Antiques Roadshow (and its local PBS fundraising effort). These days I'm trying to catalog and photograph my collection. I've got half of it done in an old database program and I'm looking for something more mobile based to replace it with - trouble is the conversion of some 700 detailed records and photos.

posted 11-30-2015 12:49 AM            

• collection database
  
• collection cataloguing software
  
• collection inventory
  
• Record keeping
  
• Cataloguing suggestions?

posted 11-30-2015 09:41 PM            

Scott posted some links to past discussions. Looking at them now, I am reminded how quickly things change in the world of technology.

I was the one who posted with enthusiasm about the late lamented Bento, which was killed by Apple/Filemaker. As I mentioned, a lot of people then migrated over to Tap Forms, which would be worth checking out.

If I were starting into this new, that might be where I would head. But I felt so burned by the corporate murder of Bento that I decided to go with Filemaker -- under the theory that it would be really hard for them to kill that one off. But hey -- one of the early posters on this topic mentioned they were using Wordperfect and Paradox, former giants (WP at least) under Corel, which both still live, but as shadows of their former selves. (I'm still a WP fan -- it was always superior to Word.)

So here I am, a couple of years later. I like the flexibility of FM. It's available for Windows and Mac -- I use it both ways. There is a mobile version, which I haven't tried -- syncing files through a cloud application has been good enough between my Windows desktop and MacBook Air. Because of its huge user base, there are active forums available for support as well as published manuals, including one that came out this year for new users. I love the graphic flexibility. Inserting photos is a breeze. Tweaking the graphics is fun. It's important to me that this looks good....so MS Access wasn't going to cut it.

Downsides: it is still a learning curve, though the current versions of FM are much easier,include a number of templates (which I don't use) and online how-to info is available. You can learn the basic stuff reasonably easily if you aren't afraid.

I have yet to figure out a simple way to show a 'grid view' or thumbnail view of collections....which was a simple button included in Bento. (There is a complicated way.) I also still need to tweak the layouts for printing reports.

Nothing beats a database for the ability to show information in a visual hierarchy, to manipulate various ways of delivering that info, and for ease of searching. Somehow, it's just plain more fun to add info into a database than into a spreadsheet.

To give you a sense of what is possible, I'm attaching some screen shots of my FM silver database. For each object, I can click on the "Master" for basic info, "Additional images" for close ups of marks and such, "Value" where I record cost info including scans of original receipts, and "Print" which is something I can put in a binder (this needs work). I've also posted for fun, the way I use FM to track plants in my garden, which gives you a sense of the possibilities.

I'd be thrilled if we had enough people using Filemaker that we could have our own little subforum for the dumb questions that come up in this sort of use. The official forums are more geared toward developers and IT professionals.

posted 12-01-2015 04:47 PM            

I've toyed with the idea of creating an Access database, but my Access skills are a few versions behind and I never fully resolved the image storage issue - which is where my current dilemma lies. I'm sure that Access or FM now handles graphics better than earlier versions did.

What I would REALLY like is a database into which I can import all my current information (extracted from the old DB into an Excel file, image file path references included). After the conversion, I would like to add, and/or delete images without having to hunt for them on my hard drive. I want to use my smartphone camera or my laptop camera to add photos during data entry. Ideally, the DB would be cloud-based and accessible from any of my devices. There are great products out there - Memento for Android looks great - but importing images is a problem (must be because their support team ignored my questions about image imports). Other databases will let you attach images, but I want it to me more seamless than that. Maybe I want too much!

posted 12-02-2015 01:37 PM            

I believe that you can import from Excel, and I believe that photo links will transfer. I copy/paste photos in all the time, without needing to browse for photos on my hard drive. That's useful for book covers in my book DB -- I pull them from the web.

As for the cloud....that again depends on your needs. I like having data stored locally, but I also have files that are also stored and synced through the cloud via Cubby. Dropbox would do the same thing.