Personal Online Catalogue

Can anyone tell me the best , easiest, and cheapest way to catalog my stamps on my computer or tablet? I have a 20, 000 stamp colection

Stsmp dazed: for initial background on your task search this site for Rod222 posts. He provided many of us with a basic grounding. Other search terms to find his pertinent posts might be "acdsee" and "explorer".

Thank you. I will search for him

I am very surprised that there is no online inventory/catalog system available, I am giving some serious thought to launching such a project. In the meantime, I really like EZStamp, which is a desktop piece of software for maintaining your stamp inventory and has a built in catalog that is updated yearly. The best part is that I can install it to a USB key and then use it wherever I go on any PC.

Dan

Someone created one on another forum and sent me a link. I made an account and have been unable to find the link! If I ever find it, i'll post it.

I use Evernote for my reference collection of +15000 items.

Advantages:

- Cloud based. Everything is available everywhere (browser, tablet, phone, desktop), and automatically synced/backed up.
- Free account available
- Easy to copy/paste images/text/documents into a 'note'
- No need to learn databases
- The iPad interface for 'scrolling' through images is great. Like ACDSee just better.
- Share your 'notebooks' with other Evernote users. The means that if you have a notebook with 4000 items, you can share this with other people having the same interest. When you add new content they get it automatically.

Perfect for stamps.

I concur that Evernote has some nice advantages, I supported them over the last few years. Being cross platform and offering storage both locally and cloud-based are certainly worthy features for this kind of service. But I constantly heard from Evernote users about performance issues; those on Macs seemed to have the most issues and were often quite frustrated. Other complained about the interface's lack of support for being able to build an index, table of contents, or other type of structural organization for their information. It should also be noted that Evernote has some security issues that many in the industry are not comfortable with.

For some reason (they say they do not have enough resources) they only use 64 bit encryption while 128 bit and 256 bit are readily available. They were also hacked last spring and sent everyone a late email basically stating 'All of Your Passwords Got Stolen So We'll Hurry Up With That Better Security'. See their link (and responses from angry users) here http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2013/...word-reset/. The data is stored in the US and US laws are applicable but note that hackers are worldwide and don't care. Some are also not comfortable with Evernotes terms and conditions where they state that Evernote employees are allowed to browse and read anything you upload.

Overall I think Evernote is a good service and I do recommend it but add the following caveat; do not upload any personal information like birth certificates, social security numbers, vacation plans, PIN numbers, or any other type of sensitive data.
don

I use Evernote on both Windows and Mac clients, and in my use-case performance is superior on Mac (even though its hardware is inferior to my Windows workstation).

It is possible to link between notes, enabling you to build a 'table of content' / hypertext structure.

I don't care about the strength of their encryption. As the data is stored in the US, I assume all three-digit-agencies have access anyway. I concur your statement about not using it for sensitive information. The issue here is using it as backend for stamps though :-)

Problem-wise I've had most problems when I used it for collaboration where multiple people added information in the same shared folder. The platform is not robust enough for that IMO.

I'll alert Rodney to this post.

I use Spreadsheets (Open Office)and Drop Box. I make up my own Spread Sheets I created to fit my need. I can refer you to Drop Box and we both get extra free space. Drop box lets me put the Data on one Computer and it goes Automatically to all my Devices. MAC, PC, IPAD ,IPhone, TABLET and so forth. This topic Stamp Software has been discussed a lot. So go to Home, Main collecting Forum and type in Software and read, read, read. The topic has been discussed many times over. P.M. me if your interested in Drop Box. It's completely free and it works Great. I have Evernote on my MAC but I don't use it much. I don't trust it. Never did. Even before it was compromised. People that don't know much about stamps think if you have stamps. They are worth a lot of money. You have to be a little discreet for security purposes. Someone could break in and steal them and other things too. By the way. There is no easy way to catalog them. It takes work and a lot of time.

G'day,
the matrix involved in your question, is counter productive, in a way,
best and cheapest do not marry.
I have over 1,000,000 stamp images, and have catalogued over the past 10 years,
In that time computing has outgrown, my preferred route.
So to answer your question as to my current thought, given the experience of the past ten years:

Today, I get more fun, enjoyment in the following.

1. Using the Scott catalogue for all countries.
2. Purchasing a genuine copy of the 2009 Scott catalogue (CD Rom)
3 Purchasing and Employing William Steiner's stamp Album Pages

Then scanning stamps outside this parameter and using windows explorer and folders and subfolders
to organise the hiearchy, ( postmarks, cinderellas, seals, perfins etc & etc)

Steiner's pages I scan when a page complete.

I can go into more detail if you so wish, but, most collectors end up with their own avenues,
without question, the windows explorer folder tree structure is by far the best and easiest function
to handle stamp images in excess of half a million. If you have the endurance to name your image files
correctly, "Agent Ransack" will find a particular stamp in 500,000 in a few seconds.

Good Luck.

My Gosh! The Rodster is back! Too much excitement for one day!