Collectorz – The least bad movie collection and cataloguing software.

This is one of those posts where I ramble about things I felt like rambling about.

As a movie and home cinema fan (geek?), computer engineer and a bit of a movie collector I of course must have a movie collection and cataloguing software.

Unfortunately there is really not many of them around and even fewer good ones. Now, I am of course not going to claim that I have tested every possible software to be found but I have gone trough a fair number of them. Collectorz, Invelos DVD Profiler, Medianizer, Eric’s Movie Database, All My Movies, eXtreme Movie Manager just to mention a few.

For quite a while I used Invelos DVD Profiler. It was (is) a very good collection software but since quite a while it has, sadly, become abandonware. The last update was in 2017 and even then the updates were not that frequent.

The software I use today is Collectorz Movie Collector. It is actually a very good piece of software and it allows you to both publish your collection to the web for viewing and to actually edit it on the web. For the latter you have to pay for a subscription though.

Having said that I have actually looked for a replacement of this software a fair number of times. Why, you might ask? Well, Collectorz has one big flaw which is very annoying and drags down the software tremendously, at least for me.

Unlike most other collection software Collectorz does not pull information from any reputable source like IMDb or TMDb but insists on having their own “Core” database. That would be fair enough, Invelos did the same thing, if the data quality was acceptable.

Unfortunately it is not. Far from it actually. There is no moderation or oversight of what is put in the Collectorz Core at all. It is truly quantity over quality that counts. The data is so bad. Publication years are often off, sometimes the genres attributed to a movie is complete nonsense, the movie posters are crap making your collection look like crap and so on and so forth. For instance, why is the movie poster in Swedish in their core database for a movie that most people watch in English but is originally Italian?

At one point I almost switched to Medianizer just because it pulls all the movie information from IMDb, or any other source you can think off, but there were too many other features that I missed and it looks like Medianizer is going down the road of becoming abandonware as well.

Fortunately you can override all the crap data once you have added a movie to your collection but this means that every time I add something I have to go through everything and fix the bad data, search and download movie posters etc… It is insanely frustrating.

The only thing Collectorz needs to do is to add an option to pull movie data from IMDb or TMDb and it would be the perfect software.

It can be used on a PC, on Android, on the Web and on iCrap. If I am not at home I can edit my collection on a web browser or on the mobile app and when I open the PC software everything is synced.

It has decent, even very good, user interface, it is quite customizable, you can edit all the pick lists for genres, formats, audio tracks etc, you can export/import your stuff in various ways. In short, it has everything that you could demand from a movie collection software.

So why oh way do they have to cling to this bloody core database when they cannot be bothered to maintain any form of acceptable data quality? A shame really. Invelos DVD Profiler had the same concept but they had an active community of moderators so their database was top notch.