Keeping Track Of All My Action Figures

Earlier I wrote about my experiences at Baltimore Comic Con. One of the issues I had leading up to comic con, however, was trying to find a way to keep track of my action figure collection so we didn't buy figures that we already had. Click on through to see what my solution was.

For my comic books, I've used the Comic Collectorz software (www.collectorz.com) for awhile now to keep track of what I do or don't have. Yet I haven't found any sort of similar software/website for letting me track what action figures I did or didn't have. I had a couple of ideas about making a database in Microsoft Access, but it would have taken too much time, and I also needed a way to view the database from my phone. That's when I stumbled onto Evernote.

In case you aren't familar, Evernote (www.evernote.com) is a place where you can create notebooks of all kinds of information and have them sync across multiple devices. I now have it installed on both my Macbook and Windows PC, as well as my iPhone and iPad. Changes I make on one device are pushed to all my different devices.

Playing around with the different options available, I first tried to create one master note that would contain all of my action figures along with a picture of them. This proved to be quite difficult, as I had trouble formatting the note and it was taking a lot of time to scroll back and forth through the note due to the amount of figures I had. Then, I realized I could make a whole notebook dedicated to action figures and have each figure be its own note. I used my webcam to take a picture of each one and resized it so that it wouldn't take up too much space (free Evernote accounts have a limit on how much can be uploaded during a month). Now, not only does the notebook look so much neater and more organized; I can also use the search feature to quickly find a certain figure and see if I have it/don't have it. Then, I shared the notebook with Ashley so that she could access it as well.

Overall, this solution has been great. It came in really handy when Ashley found those World of Warcraft figures because she could look and see which ones we already had. Now I just need to put in all the different figures that we obtained from the comic con, and I'll be all set!

Do you keep track of your action figures/other collections? How do you do it?