Cataloguing a physical game collection
Digital libraries catalogue themselves. A shelf does not, and the gap between 'I own about forty Mega Drive games' and knowing exactly which forty is the difference between a collection and a pile of boxes — most obviously when you are standing in a second-hand shop wondering whether you already have this one.
The good news is that cataloguing a physical shelf is a one-afternoon job if you approach it in the right order, and close to zero effort to maintain afterwards.
Scan barcodes for anything made after about 1995
Retail barcodes resolve to a product listing, and a product listing usually contains the game's title and platform. Scanning is roughly four seconds per game against maybe thirty for typing and correcting a title, so start here and only fall back to manual entry for what fails.
Retail listings are not clean titles, though, and this is where naive scanners fall over. A listing reads 'Pokemon Sun Nintendo 3DS 09109480' — a title, a publisher, a platform and an SKU run together. Stripping the platform and the long numeric SKU is essential; stripping publishers is not, because 'Nintendo Land' and 'Sega Bass Fishing' are real titles that lose their meaning if you do. The sane approach is to try it both ways and keep whichever scores better against a game database.
Batch your scans. Scanning a shelf one game at a time with a confirmation dialog after each is miserable; queueing twenty and confirming once is the difference between finishing the shelf and giving up at game nine.
- Expect pre-1995 cartridges to have no usable barcode — enter those by hand
- PAL and NTSC releases carry different barcodes for the same game
- Compilations and 'greatest hits' reprints often resolve to the wrong entry
- Check the platform the scan inferred before confirming a batch
Record format and completeness, because they are the collection
For digital games, ownership is binary. For physical ones it is a spectrum — cartridge only, boxed, boxed with manual, sealed — and a shelf of forty loose cartridges is a very different collection from forty complete-in-box copies. Game Manager records the half of that which changes what you can do with a game: physical or digital, per platform. Grading beyond that is a note on the game, at least for now.
Whatever you record, record it at entry time. Retrofitting condition data across two hundred games later means handling every box again, and you will not do it.
Fix the cover art you don't recognise
Automatic cover art comes from storefronts, and storefront art is made for storefronts: a crop of the key art, with the logo placed for a digital tile. For a retro game it is often the wrong region's art entirely, and for an obscure one there may be none at all.
This matters more than it sounds, because a library is scanned visually. You do not read four hundred titles — you look for the box you remember owning, and a wall of wrong or missing art turns a two-second glance into a search.
Both fixes are quick. Browse for an alternate cover and pick the one that matches the copy on your shelf, or upload your own image — a photograph of the actual box works, and for a collection where the specific edition matters it is better than anything a database will hand you.
One catalogue, both halves of the collection
The final step is not keeping the physical catalogue separate. The question you actually ask is 'do I own this game?', not 'do I own this game on a disc?', and a system that answers only half of it sends you to check two places.
File physical copies under the console they belong to, marked physical rather than digital, in the same library as everything else. Then 'do I own Metroid Prime?' has one answer — yes, a disc for the GameCube, and also digitally on Switch — which is the answer you wanted both times.