Cranboyz Online

A place for the members of the Cranboyz to share stories about Comic Books, Conventions and Artwork!



Saturday, December 8, 2012

Collectorz Tool for collections

If you read our blog than you or someone you know, at some point or another, have or had some sort of comic book “collection” or another. For most of the members of our blog I’m confident in saying the collection is a generous size. Trying to figure out a way to keep wish lists and current collection lists current and accessible has always been interesting to say the least. Always allowing my short attention span to kick in when at a con – “oh squirrel, oh squirrel”; and forgetting more than half the books I actually wanted to get. After doing some searching I came across a product called Comic Collector by Collectorz.com They created databases for Movies, Books, Music, Comic, Games, MP3 and Photos. I purchased the Pro edition of the Comic Collector and thought I’d share.



Comic Collector v.5.3 comes in three editions free, Standard and PRO. Free allows trial edition to a limit of 100 comics which is what I started with. Eventually, I purchased the Pro edition. The database is really cake to use but you can get as advanced as you want depending on your technical capabilities, usually simple is best. The database software allows you to catalog your comics automatically including full issue data, creators and character lists, cover art, etc. Now the great thing is the power of having your comics in a database. Say you are prepping for a con and you have 20 long boxes of books, but you only need the books you want signed by a specific creator.  If you search for that creator by name it will produce every comic you own. If you play your cards right and organize your boxes let’s say by number; you can enter your box number where the book is located in the notes field. Let’s look at some features…



First, the online comic database from Collectorz.com provides issue details, cover art, etc containing over 270 thousand comics and growing! They are also receiving a data feed from Diamond Comics, so anything new that is release will be added to the Collectorz online database; which is pretty great to have a live feed of current comic issue information at all time. That’s pretty hot.




Adding inventory is pretty simple too. There are numerous ways to accomplish this. You can manually enter in titles and search. This will show entire run results by volume. This is handy if you have the entire run and you can just add all of them. Have a bunch of “$1.00 bin boxes.” No problem there either (in my TV infomercial voice). There is a barcode app for your mobile device that will read your books into a list, queue them up and enter them all in at once. Also pretty hot! The app isn’t free but the manual title entry is so the choice is yours. I use my phone connected via USB cable and never had a problem with it.









Exporting and sharing is also possible via mobile app (also not free) but you can browser your database and wish list and never forget another book at another con again. Sharing is possible with PRO members and I can’t blog too much on this feature because I haven’t used it yet but, I have friends that l-o-v-e it.

Of course my most favorite part of the database is the browsing of comics in my database. I personally love the Cover Flow View and lists, statistical facts by publisher, title, creator and how about the total of all cover prices of your entire collection. I know, I know…hot.





I will include a video from the vendor as well as screenshots but implore you, if you have any type of collection you want to track, try this product. I am receiving nothing from this blog post. I think it’s a great product, that’s all. What can you lose, the basic install is free!

Comic Collector Free Trial - http://www.collectorz.com/comic/freetrial.php

Compatibility:
  The MacOS X edition is compatible with Mac OS X 10.5.8 or highter (Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion)

 The Windows edition runs on Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP.