Instead of asking you to type in, say, a book’s title, author and other details, you simply point your computer’s camera at the book’s bar code. What makes Delicious Library so delicious is automation. That’s the magic of Delicious Library 2, a $25 Mac program that I found to be the best of the home inventory managers I tested. (Confusingly, Home Inventory for the Mac is not related to Home Inventory for the iPhone.) I found this program as quick and as easy to use as Compartments, but Home Inventory has a plus: it offers a companion “remote” that lets you take pictures and add details of your stuff with your iPhone. The second Mac program I liked was Home Inventory, by Binary Formations, which is $15. The first, a $10 program called Compartments by LittleFin Software, has a nice feature called WarrantyGuard that tracks your items’ warranty expiration dates so that, if something goes wrong, you can quickly learn if you are still covered. Two Mac programs I tried offer roughly the same features as Collectify, and both are much cheaper and better designed. Don’t expect to catalog hundreds of DVDs this way. You click on a photo, then type in a barrage of details (if you can find or remember them): How much did you pay for that couch? What’s the model number of your TV? Setting up your inventory on Collectify is a weeks-long process, and consequently may be best just for a few large or expensive items. The quickest is to photograph everything in the room and upload the pictures into Collectify. Collectify offers several ways of doing this. After listing all the rooms in your house, you add details of each object by room. It has an intuitive interface and a straightforward way to input your items.
#Home inventory mac software download
Which brings us to Collectify Home Inventory, a $50 program for Windows that you can download and try out for 30 days without obligation.
#Home inventory mac software software
On a touch screen, it is maddening.īetter, I thought, to stick with home inventory software for full-size PCs. Typing in the make, model, price and other data for all your goods would be a hassle on a regular keyboard. It will also prove handy for insurance claims, and it will avoid the “spice rack” problem, where you end up with a half-dozen bottles of chili pepper in the kitchen because you were always unsure if you had any. Creating and maintaining an inventory might take a few weekends, but it will help you better understand what you own - a first step toward getting rid of unnecessary things, like those three extra copies of “The Great Gatsby.”Īnd if you have only one copy of “Gatsby,” such a product will tell you where it is (bedroom closet? bookshelf in the den?). In other words, not me.īut if you are a neat freak - if you look forward to cleaning your closets on weekends, or rejoice at the prospect of alphabetizing your DVDs - then consider investing in a good home inventory manager. Unfortunately, even the best ones require some work - too much work, I imagine, for all but the most organized people.
There are lots of bad, a few so-so, and some great computer programs to help you create an inventory. But that’s not really my style I’m a materialist to the core. Ascetic readers would advise us to pare down, to lead simple, joyful, stuff-free lives. At any moment there are several phones, computers, video game systems and other small electronics strewn around the floor of my home office, and many more in every other part of the house.Īs if that weren’t enough stuff, my family has too many other things: I’m a sucker for cooking equipment, my wife’s stash of yarn keeps the world’s shepherds in business (she’s a knitter), we both buy more books than we can read, and our baby is constantly showered with toys and clothes. Technology companies are always sending me gadgets to evaluate it’s my job to catalog everything that arrives, keep notes on how I use the products, maintain the packing materials and manuals, and then send it all back. It’s just that I’m a tech reviewer, and sometimes that amounts to the same thing. HONESTLY, I didn’t set out to be a hoarder.
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