The Specific Grief of Owning 400 Films You Can't Navigate

A physical film collection that has grown past a certain threshold stops being a library and becomes a problem you've decided to live with. You know you own the Blu-Ray of something you're currently paying to stream. You have two copies of a title in different formats because you forgot you bought it on DVD before the Blu-Ray release. You've lent a film to someone whose name you now cannot reconstruct. The "Took" field in this template exists because every serious collection eventually has this problem and pretending otherwise is how you end up down three copies of a film you're searching for in a bucket.

The format chaos in mixed physical collections is what sends people looking for a database solution. DVD versus Blu-Ray versus external hard drive versus the Toshiba laptop that has its own folder of files — these are not equivalent storage states, and treating them as equivalent in a flat list or a mental map breaks down at scale. Format affects playback, affects duplicates purchasing decisions, affects which device you need for a given film on a given night.

What a Well-Built Film Record Actually Captures

The tagline field is the unexpected workhorse of this template. A plot description tells you what a film is about. A tagline tells you what a film was sold as — a completely different piece of information that's often more useful for the retrieval problem you actually have, which is: I know I own something with a certain tone or marketing angle, what is it?

The MyLocation field — with options for "DVD's bucket 1" and "Pendiente HD" (the holding drive for films not yet watched) — is a physical retrieval index built directly into the record. This is where the catalog earns its value in a home with a real collection. Filtering by location tells you immediately what's in bucket 1 versus what's sitting on the hard drive waiting. It's the difference between finding a film in 90 seconds and spending 12 minutes moving cases around before admitting you lent it out.

The combination of Watched boolean plus My Rating creates a two-stage triage system. Unwatched films with no rating are the backlog. Watched films with a rating below 3 are candidates for culling or lending out permanently. Watched films with a 5 are the ones you want immediately accessible rather than buried in a bucket. Running that filter on 400 entries takes seconds. Running it on a mental model of 400 films, at 10pm when you want to watch something good, is how you end up putting on something mediocre again.

The Quantity field handles the duplicate problem without requiring you to create multiple records for the same title. If you own a film in both DVD and Blu-Ray formats, the format field won't capture both — but Quantity gives you a flag that there are multiple physical objects associated with this title, which prompts the lookup on the second record or the annotation in comments.

The Loan Problem, Filed Under Contacts

The "Took" contact field is the single most underappreciated piece of this template's architecture.

It's a contact link, not a text field. That means when you want to filter by "films currently out on loan," you're not text-searching for names. You're filtering against an actual contact record, which means it's tied to a phone number, an address, a person who exists in your device's contact list.

Every collector who has owned more than about a hundred films has a mental list of films that are "probably at someone's place" and a vaguer mental list of whose place that might be. The contact link turns that ambiguity into a record you can sort by name, filter by who has the most films out, and actually act on.