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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;krispy, post: 1912223, member: 19065&quot;]<b>Offline: </b></p><p>I like using Excel spreadsheets because of the ability to customize them to no end and the familiarity of the software, if ever I should need to exchange files with others or work across platforms. Excel is nice for linking to URLs, doing quick calculations, and making links to image files of coins you have of your coins, as others have already stated.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Online:</b></p><p>To a limited degree, I use <a href="http://www.pcgs.com/setregistry/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.pcgs.com/setregistry/" rel="nofollow">PCGS Set Registry</a> for keeping an inventory of my PCGS certified coins and I like that I can upload an image of the coins there. Plus it allows you to see how the values are doing since they provide that data online. I don&#039;t use PCGS for building (or competing in) registry sets. The same thing can be done with <a href="http://www.pmgnotes.com/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.pmgnotes.com/" rel="nofollow">PMG</a> for certified banknotes. I use these services free of charge as these companies allow this access, without a paid membership.</p><p><br /></p><p>I like what I see with Heritage Auctions&#039;, <i>My Collection</i> but I haven&#039;t really used it, yet. However, I often use HA for access to population and archived auction prices. They offer a great amount of information without having to pay other sites a membership to access it. FWIW, the NGC Research Price Guides are great tools available for use online, too.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.numismaster.com" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.numismaster.com" rel="nofollow">Numismaster.com </a>offers a coin collection inventory tool online that is pretty good, and even without the paid subscription, you can get a lot of coin specs, upload images and keep track of your coins for free online.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://thecoinnection.com" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://thecoinnection.com" rel="nofollow">The Coinnection, </a>is another nice website that I have enjoyed using and intend to use more. It was created by a CoinTalk member, too. And several members have registered free accounts there. It has one of the nicest interfaces I have seen for coin inventories online, and it&#039;s modeled to be a socially interactive site, allowing pier-to-pier grading of your collection.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Image file management (online):</b></p><p>Image files are another realm of digital collection organization that can get kind of hard to wrangle after a while, especially if you have presentation images and others used to sell coins. It&#039;s important to come up with a file naming convention that works for you and helps you sort things out.</p><p><br /></p><p>I like Photobucket (online and smartphone App) for the free accounts offered giving you a large amount of memory to store image files online. The other nice thing about that is their fast access to upload, caption, tag and generate URLs of your image files. On Photobucket, you can create albums and have a Library that you sort files by folders online. Image hosting on Photobucket also allows you to set image collection privacy (or public) settings. If ever you post an image on a forum such as CT, and later wish to edit the thread post but cannot, you can still delete the image file later on Photobucket effectively removing it from a forum post or if used on other sites.</p><p><br /></p><p>Flickr was mentioned, and being a product of Yahoo it tends to be heavily managed and is more community based. It&#039;s a nice site for image hosting and photo sharing, but I&#039;ve found they frequently change their interface (online and with the App) and upload speeds as well as download speeds for users vary greatly. Flickr has become more of a social media site than an image hosting interface (though some use if for that), plus Flickr requires an annual paid membership if you use up your bandwidth or image storage space on the free accounts.</p><p><br /></p><p>Keeping image files organized is a chore, but a necessary one I think, especially if you should ever need to quickly access an image of a coin to show someone, sell a piece or use in a claim if lost/damaged.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Image file management (offline):</b></p><p>I create folders on a portable hard drive that are sorted by country and within those by coin type. File names for the images include (Krause numbers, Km#, for world coins), a coins date, mint mark, denomination, keywords (IHC, SLQ, ASE, etc.) if needed, and if certified, the TPGs certification number plus its grade. If more than one shot of the coin, I include &quot;O&quot; or &quot;R&quot; to distinguish obverse and reverse in the file names.</p><p><br /></p><p>The same is done for paper money, using folders to store images, but those are arranged by Freidberg numbers, a note&#039;s series, and serial number in addition to denomination, grade, certification number, designation codes (PPQ, ChCU, etc. ) and keywords (if needed).</p><p><br /></p><p>Essentially each coin and note gets a folder on a hard drive and any invoice information, research materials (other data files) and image files are contained in the folders.</p><p><br /></p><p>I find there&#039;s no one way to go about it all, and it&#039;s more of a vast toolbox of options to use, apply as needed, taking data assembled from various web resources, books, and catalogs and depending on how you need to access any of it and/or share your collection, it&#039;s value, and so on, help you get what you need accomplished. I kind of like having redundant data across online and offline sources too, so if I should loose information somewhere, I can access it in another location, or remotely depending on where I am.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think your own approach will be defined by your needs and evolve as does your collecting habits and cycles. I hope this gives you some ideas to think about.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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