General Forum

I'm curious, how do you guys store your cards and actually be able to find them?

I store my traders and commons in 3200 counter monster boxes.  I store my PC cards in soft sleeves and toploaders ........  

Brand, then year, then team, then alphabetical order by last name. If it's a mix of random brands then I skip that part and just go team and last name.

The answer you are looking for will depend on how you collect. Are you grabbing individual cards as investments? I don't know how to store those easily. If you are collecting sets or teams or players, which most of us on here do, then there are lots of answers.

Briefly, this is what I do.

For team collection, I have everything in binders by company and then by year. Some products have two binders. Binder spines are labelled.

For individual player collections, I have a mash-up going on. One player is organized well with a binder for his cards and spaces to fill in the cards I am missing. He only has 2000 and something total cards so it's more manageable. Another player is in a binder sorted by year to a point but has no space to add missing cards. His binder will need to be worked on next...5000plus cards makes it more daunting. A third player has so many cards that I don't use a binder, but an old library card catalog. Currently, four drawers are filled with his cards. They are sorted by year only although some recent years are still not well organized...14000+ cards make it less likely it will ever be a nice neat collection.

For sets, they are in the card catalog as well, labeled by year and set. Some sets are in binders too as the card catalog is a new addition in the last couple of years and I'm not sure how I want to use it in the long term. 

My cards to trade are labeled by year in various-sized boxes. Boxes that are uploaded to the site are labeled in pencil and have green tape on the end to skip over boxes that are not uploaded. I am starting to move them around so that multiple sets may be in the same box but try to get the same years together for faster finding of things. 

The thousands of things not uploaded and random cards etc...well, they are just a mess for another day!

Boxes organized by sport, then by year starting with the earliest, brand alphabetically, then by number in set order. Any inserts stored in alpha order, by number at the back of the set. Basically organized in the same sort of tree I would find things when searching on TCDB.

My Illini PC: Autographs in toploaders in a box. Rookie cards, SN, or any cards of players in Illini jerseys are all in binders so I can actually look at them. The rest are organized by player, in order that they appear on TCDB when searching all cards of that player.

For all cards in boxes, I have paper tabs dividing the sets so I know what I am looking at.

Sounds like a "how are you organized" question. The cards that I am keeping - sets in binders (as much as I can) and in card boxes sized by the size of the sets from any particular year and company.  All my Topps sets are in one location by year (book shelves); same for all the other companies. This makes it much easier to find a set when I get a card to add to it. The base set and sometimes some of the insert sets are in the binder; an 800-ct box holds all the other cards from that year by that company beside the binder.

My Player Collection is stored in top loaders by player in 3- and 4- row boxes that hold top loaders and in redesigned old B&W tvs that I gutted and made drawers for that fit top loaders.  Each one holds about 4,000 cards. They are sorted again by year / company / card # following the order they show up here on TCDb. This makes it easy to verify my colelcction against the TCDb list.

My traders are kept in another room where the computer I use for TCDb is.  They are stored by company, year, card # (I do have traders for players that are in my PC stored in shoe boxes or larger boxes).  By being organized this way, I can pull a large trade in less than a day, a PWE trade in less than 30 minutes even if the trade crosses multiple companies and sets. I have over 400,000 cards that are traders so many boxes, mostly 5,000-ct boxes.

The above is all baseball.  The other sports and non-sports are stored by sport, by year, by company, by card #.  Again easy to find when someone is asking for a trade across more than one sport / non-sport. I don't collect the other sports but I do collect some non-sports so the keepers are again on a shelf away from my traders, mostly in binders. 

Hope this helps.

To help you out, if you do a search on forum threads, type in storage and you'll see 65 threads specific to this topic. Plenty of great ideas in those thread as well.

Briefly, for me, my sets are stored in 800ct boxes. Wish I could binder, but space dictates otherwise. The end of each box is marked by a code signifying sport/brand/assigned number. That corrosponds to my spreadsheet so I can easily find something. My inserts are stored in 5K boxes and organized like they are in here, by year/brand/set name. My PC is stored alphabetically and eventually I'll have that done up like my inserts. Traders are stored in 5K boxes and sorted like my inserts. Everything is stored separately from each other to reduce cross-contamination possibilities. Because that has never happened to me....

My trade fodder goes in 3200 boxes and are arranged by year, then by manufacturer and product (base, Opening Day, Heritage, Holiday, etc) then by type (base, rookie or parallel).  My PC cards get penny sleeves and top loaders.  These all go in their own separate box.

I was wondering this also, i cant seem to figure out how some cards randomly vanish. It is probably becuase of my organizational style- which apparently could use some work. 

Not just you. Think it's every collector's nightmare no matter how organized they may be.