Organizing the Collection

crowtales

Hello!

I've been messing around with the organization and tracking of my pin collection for a while now and as it continues to grow, I'm bumping into an emerging truth - Finding an individual pin in my collection app is more and more of a pain in the ass.

I wrote the Android collection app, and when I did that, I used the same setup that Pinnywise and pinnypals.com use. That is to say, we all separate the pins by where they were first released (West/South/East/Aus/Staff/Online/Other). This makes a lot of sense when we're working to collect the pins from each new Pax, but as the years pile on, when you try to go back thru a collection, it gets difficult to remember - Did this one pin I just got come out at West/Prime? And what year? It's easy to miss something as you scroll thru the list.

So I'm wondering - Is there a more future-proof system we should be migrating to now, before that becomes ridiculously difficult? What categories would you use?

In first thinking of it, I'm sorely tempted to break things down by Content.
PA/Staff
PA/MainChars
PA/Automata
PA/Eyrewood
Bethesda
Alienware
etc

But maybe that's too sprawling too. Anyone have ideas?

-crowtales

thx42

If we're talking about a physical collection, where everything has to go in one place, then I would separate by West, East, Aus, South, PAX, Online, Other. And then within each of those, I would separate by year.

For an app, or database, I would give each pin multiple tags, so it could be organized in multiple ways. In addition to the above broad categories, I would add company, game, free/paid, limited edition, character.

fishfishmonkeyhat

I've been thinking we need user submitted searchable tags to pinnypals for a while now.

animal, unicorn, capcom etc.

YO @grgemonkey!

Ayefkay

I would like atleast tags for each year of release on pinnypals,

grgemonkey

I think you can get pretty much any useful filter by doing the following conditions.

pinName
setName
year
pax
partnerName
tag

Getting too specific tends to dilute the usefulness of searches, the "specificness" should be able to be built by AND/OR/NOT operators.

It's been planned for ages, I've wanted a search field at the top of every page with pins on it since the site existed.

The tags database I was just going to roll in with the wiki but an interim page for people to submit tags can't hurt, same data really.

fishfishmonkeyhat

It can be like pinmash but it's tagmash and we mash tags.