Stamp Manage Software

Does any one use this program? I have for years. I upgraded to 2017 and it now takes more than 5 minutes to open. Liberty Street seems unable to help with this.
Gary

I use it (2016 version); it takes under 4 seconds to start but admittedly this is on a high end computer.

How much hard drive space is free on your PC? If it gets below 50% your PC will slow down a lot with opening apps like this one. Do you have Microsoft Access on your PC? If so, you might consider trying to open the MDB file with Access and see if it is also slow. Additionally, you might want to run a 'Repair' on the MDB from Access. Note: backup your files before doing anything like this.
Don

Even Paul who sells this was unable to repair this when he remotely controlled my pc. 2016 opened within 20 secs before I upgraded to 2017.

I'm having no problems with my 2017 upgrade. Opens within 10 seconds on a faster computer. My program used to have a problem with an auto backup after each use, but I was able to figure out how to change that to every 10 uses.

I hate to admit that I am still running the 2009 version of
Liberty Street.

2017 works fine for me, at least as well as 2016. Have you added anything else to your computer lately, especially an updated anti-virus or anti-malware program? Unfortunately, every Windows computer has different configurations, and it can be the devil itself to sort out all the potential conflicts.

I've just downloaded and installed this program today. I've been spending more time creating spreadsheets and databases for inventory with lots of data entry and finally decided to have someone else do the work.

Purchase, download, and installation were easy if time consuming. Even with a reasonably fast computer it took well over an hour to completely install. Considering there are over 5GB of images alone to be unzipped and files created this really isn't unreasonable. But have a couple of cups of coffee or another project to keep you occupied while the installation chugs away.

I've found the written documentation to be somewhat unclear, which is usually the norm for most software nowadays. There are videos online which I plan to watch and hopefully that will make things more obvious. It does look like a powerful program with good reporting so I am willing to work at it to get it to where I want it to be.

The user interface is clean and the images are sharp and of good quality from what I have seen so far.

I'll report back in a little while after I have used it for a while and let you know what I think.

Geoff

Executive Summary...
Any application which accesses thousands of image files is going to be highly dependent upon a good performing hard drive. As area66 noted, running this app on a SSD (solid state) hard drive makes it blazingly fast (install or opening the app). Trying to install it on a hard drive which is more than 50% full (or highly fragmented) will bring the performance to a painful level.

Techie Details...
A standard (not SSD) hard drive is one of the last mechanical parts in a computer. It is a spinning disk much like a traditional LP record. When it has to write files it does not write them to a single, contiguous area on the disk. Instead it scatters the pieces of the file all across the surface, in many, many places. So when a app opens, just to retrieve one of the files, it has to rotate the disk around multiple times to fetch all the pieces. This often means waiting for the disk to rotate around several times. Now multiply this process times thousands of image file this app is trying to access and you can understand why it takes so long.

To see if this is a problem, look at the hard drive access LED on your computer as the app is opening. If it is constantly hitting the LED until the app finally gets open you have figured out the problem.

The only thing you can do is improve the performance of your hard drive. The best way to do this is to not try to run a hard drive which is more than 50% full and is optimized (or defragged).
Don

The amount of RAM may also be a bottleneck, as using the page file (especially one on a HDD) will bring your computer to its knees. You can check your memory usage via the task manager.

Good luck.

So on Monday with 2016 running it opens in a matter of seconds. On Tuesday with 2017 installed it takes more than 5 minutes? Is this a hard drive problem. I have begged Liberty Street to help with this and no reply yet.

Perhaps you originally had the 2016 version with much fewer images but when you upgraded it installed the full worldwide version? I think they changed the way they packaged the application and hold back just the catalog values now but install very world wide image.

1.) Is your hard drive LED light on the computer fired up the entire 5 minutes it is loading?

2.) Have you checked the Windows log file to see if it is throwing any errors when it loads? If any there are faults and errors when loading an application they would typically be noted in the Application Log file.

Between the previous two questions you should be able to narrow down this down to either 'the app has broken something' vs. 'it is loading properly but just taking a long time'.

It may be best to try to figure this issue out yourself...Liberty Street has probably the worse tech support on earth, you may be waiting a long, long time.
Don

Thank you. All of this is beyond my meagre skills. I need someone who knows how to do this or check this to help me.

I've been using Stamp Manage for a couple of weeks now and it is working out fairly well.So far, I have entered over 1600 stamps from my primary Great Britain up to 1971 and US up to 1975 collections.

As I mentioned, it took some time to install and I still find the instructions a bit vague, but with trial and error I've got it to work well. I'm still not sure I understand how I created the countries in my collection but it's working.

There is a wide range of fields to enter data about the stamp: format, condition, centering, gum, cancellation, etc. I've only gotten into detail on some of my more "valuable" holdings. Purchase price, source, date bought, additional pictures, a want list, there are a tremendous number of options.

There is an additional field for a second catalog number labeled for Gibbons but I don't see any reason it could not be used for another catalog; I plan to put in Michel numbers for my Germany collection.

The stamp database includes a large number of Scott number varieties for the US stamps. It includes a 2017 values database, but I am not sure where it comes from. Many issues have more than ten different values based on condition, FDC, sheet, or plate block. Prices are easily changed.

I have not tried many reports yet. They run quickly and there are a lot of output options. I am getting an error when I attempt to export a report to Excel, which I will have to research.

Overall, after having tried a couple of self-created Excel and Access databases, I have found this much easier and with more features than I would every create for myself (pictures alone!)
I'll post back again after a while with a longer term report.

Geoff

Hello, I have just joined this forum, been looking at stamp SW databases and not sure what would be simple yet good. I have about 1600 stamps all aircraft.. could anyone advise which Sw would suit my needs. Any help appreciated. John

Stamp Manage has a database by topic feature that includes planes and aviation, but is very limited in content. There is a topic field in the stamp database so it looks like you can select stamp from the country database and assign it a topic. I'm not a topical collector, so I haven't taken a look at it. Their online help is not great but there may be something in their forum about how to do it.

You can download a trial version for 30 days.

Geoff

I have been using it for a while and it works perfectly. I am using on a Mac with a program called Parallels which allows you to run PC programs, loads very quickly. It's helped me to finally get organized. There are good Youtube videos to explain the 2017 program.