Alphabetical, all 22 movies

The whole genre, sub-genre, and niche method only really flies if you've got a lot of titles. I've only got 315 and to break everything up into genres and sections wouldn't make sense, since outside of TV and wrestling, I don't have an overwhelming number of titles from any given genre.

For someone with thousands of titles, I can see the genre approach working and being a cool concept, too, but not otherwise.

Those of you who do have thousands of titles, how did you organize your DVDs when you had say, only a couple hundred?

I only have SW, Box movie sets, Kevin Smith Films, BBC shows, and Pixar films seperated out of my normal collection. The rest are alphabetical in their own shelf.

I just go alphabetically, with certain obvious exceptions (LOTR: TTT comes before ROTK even though R comes before T in the alphabet, and both versions of the trilogy are together). Sometimes the "sort titles" in DVD Profiler have to be changed.

I file alphabetical with main movies in one case thats almost filled expect for sequels going in made order. Then the other almost full case has alphabetical amimated Disney, TV, and Superheros (Bond, Indy, Superman).

My system is pretty simple. One small bookcase is for all television shows. Then all movies are alphabetical on another two cases. Then finally are two separate categories of Music/Sports/Miscellaneous and Pro Wrestling.

Mine are spread over 4 or 5 different rooms in two houses. The system works OK but there are times I can't find one - or even remember if I own it.

Nope, alphabetical for me.

Same way, less titles and less genre.

I've tried breaking down my collection by genre a couple of times, and have never really liked it much. Too many things are hard to categorize. My collection is broken up as follows, with titles alphabetical in each group:

Anime
Television
Documentary
Everything else (pre-1970)
Everything else (1970-present)

The pre/post-1970 break is more logistical than aesthetic. I needed to break the bulk of my collection up for storage reasons. I've tried other methods, but the chronological seems to work best for me. YMMV. The choice of 1970 for the break point was determined largely by the number of titles involved.

On my shelves I have four "sections"-- Movie Box (collectors) sets; Regular movies; Region 1 TV shows; and Region 2 TV shows-- then alphabetical in each section. But that's just for ease of finding things on the shelves. In my databases I have it set up like this:
The Microsoft Works database has TWO databases--on for TV-on-DVD and one for film. Film is broken down by: Title, Director, Editon (Collectors, Special, Extended, etc), Number of Discs, Date, Genre1, Genre2, Director2, and up to six actors.
TV has Title1 (name of series), title2 (name of set--eg Season 1, Series 1, Ep title, or whatever is appropriate to specify the set), numberofeps, numberofdiscs, Source/Country (the original TV network/and country of origin), Comments, and up to three actors.

Genres in my collection include: Action, Adventure, Classic, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Musical, SF, Thriller, and Documentary.

My Microsoft Access database doesn't have to be split between Movies and TV-on-DVD because it's set-up in fully relational fashion; therefore Directors are in one table and Actors in another table, TV-on-DVD titles in a table, Films in a table etc--and I use primary keys to give EVERYTHING a unique alphanumeric code. This means in the look-up table called "Call" I can list an actor's appearances BOTH in films and in TV--it also means I can list more than 3 or 6 actors for one work (convenient for LotR).
I also have my music collection in the *same* Access database (Artist, MusicCD, and Trackfinder tables-- "Trackfinder" is particularly useful--because I list each track with it's own primary key and then relate them to artists and CDs--very helpful to figure out "which" various artist CD a particular song is on). My non-fiction and fiction books are set up on the same Access database, but I haven't entered the data yet. I also need to set up an "epfinder" table, similar to the "trackfinder" table, to list episode titles and if I have them very, very short descriptions of the episodes, plus guest actors from episodes can be listed in the "appearance" table and cross-indexed.
So far the tables in my Microsoft Access database are:
Actor, ActorAppearance, Artistdata, Author (books), BookF (fiction), BookNF (nonfiction), CDAudio, Country_DATA, DirectorDATA, DVDTV, FilmDATA, Film_Director (lookup table), Genre_DATA, MusicCD, SourceDATA (lists TV networks), Subject_Data (for books, F and NF), Trackfinder.
Coming soon: Epfinder.


--BritTV Fan

Pagansoul said quote: I got rid of all my snappers and converted to keep cases so I don't have that problem. :Unquote

ME TOO!!! I scanned/copied the snapper cover on my printer, put the copy into a blank keep case, put the DVD in the keep case and took all the old snapper cases and stuck them in a box in the closet. I HATED the things, the lip kept catching my other DVd cases and they either wouldn't go to the back of the shelf, or they'd stick-out.
I think I did between 15 and 20 snapper cases to keep cases. Didn't cost much--the blank cases came in 5 packs for about $5-$6, I started with scanning the old snapper case on regular paper, but soon found that copying onto photopaper worked better. BUT you have to remember to let the ink dry!!! (Being completely new to printing photos I discovered that by unhappy accident).

--Brit TV fan

One more thing-- Since I have my entire DVD collection in two seperate databases (I'm keeping up the older Microsoft Works database, even tho' I now have an Access one as well)--I can search by *any* field listed, but when I print a report of my collection, I consistly print it one of three ways: TV-on-DVD alpha (not seperated by Region); Movies-alpha, and Movies-by-date (oldest first). Film collection runs from 1931 to 2004. I don't keep track of dates on my TV-on-DVD titles since each season has a different date AND US seasons run on the Academic year, so it's pointless.

Oh--and I forgot, my Doctor Who DVDs are in there own little section, just before regular (non-collector's edition) movies. They were in the TV barrister bookcase but took up too much space. The Barrister case has the collector's movies sets and the R1 TV sets. Doctor Who, movies, and R2 TV discs are in the "media" shelving unit, with some older VHS tapes.

--Brit TV fan