Well, not really. After trying, for years, to find a good library program – one that would let me catalogue not only the physical media in my library but all the image files and mp3s as well – I gave up.
I decided that I would break the task into two parts. First, I would use a library program to build an index of all books, dvds, cds, games, etc. Second I would utilize standardized tags built into the file names of all my digital media for easy searching. Third, once finished, I would sacrifice a goat to the media gods in the hopes I would never have to do this again.
For the first, I purchased a copy of Delicious Library for the mac and a Cue Cat barcode scanner. These two products provided a quick and easy way to get all my media entered into the index. Once entered, DL is easy to search through and organize by whatever criteria you feel is most important.
For the second, well, that was a bit more tricky. First I brainstormed a few tags in a basic hierarchy. I decided to run with the following order for music files: Artist-Album-Song Name-Special-Format. (“Special” is used for tags like “live” or “acoustic” to differentiate various versions of one song by the same artist.) For photos, I opted for: Subject/event-place-date-format. The system has worked so far. I was able to dump all files into large folders labeled music and photos and then use various desktop searches or application searches to find what I was looking for.
It is not a perfect set-up and it has led me to notice that I have several copies of some photos and sometimes a mis-labeling or two, but it works for the most part. I still plan to tweak and fiddle with the system, but, in the meantime, at least I can find everything.
