Wow. Old subject. Found my own answer from way back when and that is still the only way to do it in my opinion.
Sorting alphabetically by title is fantastic (not) as long as you don’t plan on buying any box sets or double features whatsoever.
Sort the damn releases by label dammit and if your brain can’t remember who put out a given movie well there are resources online (www.ofdb.de, www.dvdaf.com) that can tell you. Really not that hard.
If your collection consists of dvdrs (shame on you), well alphabetic is of course the way to go. If you are a sorting freak you will have printed your own covers which display the original title on the spine and nothing can really be easier.
[quote=“Søren, post:81, topic:1660”]Sorting alphabetically by title is fantastic (not) as long as you don’t plan on buying any box sets or double features whatsoever.*
If your collection consists of dvdrs (shame on you), well alphabetic is of course the way to go. If you are a sorting freak you will have printed your own covers which display the original title on the spine and nothing can really be easier.**[/quote]
*Yep - all my proper stuff starts out like that - but eventually ends up as scherpy’s system though
**I was referring to my deviant trade dvdrs (shame on me) for the newly applied alphabetical method. A visual prop and printing of a cd size cover sized cover (as some already have) would be good and help with my memory. Now they are stored about 80 or so at a time in 4 rhinestone-encrusted cd boxes.
It’s certainly a better system than I previously employed - which was utterly crap.
Well, I figure I’ll put my bit in since sorting has always been a bit of a problem for me. I sort first by format, Blu-rays then DVD’s, then alphabetically by title, non-spelled numbers first (3 Bullets for Ringo is up at the front, for example) excluding articles of course. As far as double features go, I sort by the title that comes first on the spine, unless only one title is a Spaghetti; The Cobra/Ringo the Lone Rider, for example, is sorted by Ringo. For the most part, double features make some sort of sense when they are put together, usually sharing a common actor or director or something, so finding the 2nd title is often not too hard. If I do get stumped trying to find a title, I’ve got a Google docs list of all the releases sorted how they are on my shelf, so I just need to do a quick search to find where a title is located. Boxed sets and collections are at the end, sorted alphabetically by collection title. This is really not a big of an issue for me as it might be for others, since the sets are either all tied to a “series” (Sabata, Sartana, Sergio Leone, etc) or are cheapo sets (Mill Creek 44 movie, etc) which include film I’ve either got in a better version elsewhere or I’m not in a hurry to watch again. If I need to reference something or see if I’ve got a film somewhere, the list I mentioned has all the titles in a collection, so I would just need to do a search through there and maybe cross-reference the SWDB in case a film has been released with more than one title. Oh, and in the case of foreign languages, I sort by the title on the spine, so non-English letters are at the end of the alphabet for me. I don’t have more than a couple foreign-language releases and no Japanese ones, so no real worries on that front.
As far as sorting by label goes, I tried that one time and it frustrated me. I have more Wild East releases than any other label and they number their spines by releases regardless of genre, so when I tried putting them all together they looked real nice, but the WE-### would always have a missing number for a release that’s sorted in my Eurocrime or Macaroni Combat sections, which are sorted in the same fashion.
I’ve still only got one (nearly full) shelf of spags, approximately totaling just over 100 cases, so who knows how this will turn out when I’ve reached the levels of some of you guys :
At long last, by director, alphabetically. Now I know which films I have, where I can find them, and they are there where I think they are! What a relief!
No, that’s how I go too, although I’ve separated my DVD collection from my blu-ray collection because I hate how higgledy-piggledy DVDs and blus look together on a shelf. Plus, they’re a bugger to dust like that.
These days I’m a hodge podge of sorting by blu-rays/dvd, directors and titles. Its a mix, and generally its kind of “where would I look for this film” - kind of hard to explain in a post, but its all based on putting titles next to each other that I feel belong next to each other. Kind of like a specialty section at a video store.
I used to sort my DVDs in an esoteric way. Would drive my wife crazy. Some by director, some by genre, some by decade, some by actor. I had a Steve Martin section and a Michael Caine section, connected in the middle by Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
I don’t have that big of a collection really but what I do have…some of it is by director (Leone, Corbucci), and some of it is by company (for instance I have all my Arrow releases next to each other so it makes this big line of A’s across the shelf lol).
