General Forum

Trying to come up with a storage system to better keep track of what card, set etc is in what box and location.

Looking for ideas to better keep track of everything. I have over 150,000 cards, many not organized and mixture of sports or years. Understand the best way is to separate by sport, year, set and order by card number. I have enough boxes and card houses to organize just looking for ways to keep a tracking system associate with this site with locations. I have some collections now by boxes but when you get a trade proposal or searching for items to give a PIF the site does not show what box just I have the card.

HELP

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I use excel, haves and wants page and label the boxes with avery labels and transfer those back to my spreadhseet

From the side of linking physical storage location to the site can you label each box then record the box name against each card in the comment or tag area of detailed add?

You could then open the card to view the comment/tag. You can also search you collection by either as well FWIW.

I'm not sure how effective this would be as have never used it. For 150k cards it would be a mammoth undertaking As well. It might be easier and quicker to physically sort the cards to sport/non-sport, set, cars number etc as you suggested.

Excel is how I track my PC. It’s easily searchable.  
 

150K cards??? What a collection!  I am wondering if you have any of the cards that have eluded me for years….

If it is to organize your traders, I think you have it in your own OP. The only difference I make is for baseball in that I have them by Sport, Company, Year, Set, #. All products of one company are together. The biggest suggestion I can make is that you order them in the same order as they would show up on this site. It makes it much easier to know when you have gone too far in a box of cards looking for an elusive card. This is specially true for sports you don't actually collect and are less familiar with the cards.

I use this same system in my PC and my sets that are not in binders. I used to have some of my PC of individual players in top loaders and some in binders. I eventually went to all top loaders and these are in the actual order they show up on the site when I look at my collection of that player. No need for any other indicator as to where any specific card is; anything really special such as my 1948 Bowman Musial RC, I know where I have it either when on display or put away for safe keeping.

My sets are also organized the same way. Every set is either in a binder with a suitably-sized card box beside it for the multiple parallels and inserts that are not in the binder. On the shelves, they are obviously organized by Year, the binder first with the box(es) on the right of the corresponding binder. 

In being organized this way, I can find any card I have in my set collection, PC, or traders in less than a minute, time being only to unstack the larger boxes of traders till I get to the year I am looking for. I have over 125,000 traders listed (many more doubles in baseball that are not listed so actually have over 400K for trade), My actual collection just went over 300K; this includes PC, sets, and non-sports. So yes, I understand the importance of being well organized.

You said it. Easiest. Box by sport. Then year , brand, sets labeled on front of box. Cards in numerical order in the sets.  Boxes in order by year, brand(abc order). 

to put on tcdb ? Not needed. 

With that many cards that's an undertaking of a project and sorting by set would seem to be the best option and then numbering within the set, then labeling your boxes. 

I don't label the boxes because when you get new inventory, some will be pushed into another box. If organized as described, pulling boxes till you hit the right year is not a problem. Knowing what stack of boxes to start from becomes easy if doing lots of trades.

I guess im old school with how I keep track of my pc. I have six large binders with lists of every raiders card made (that I can find) I highlight the one I have. I will also be putting them on here when im done with organizing. Every card is in a penny sleeve, toploader and team bag then put in order in a two row and those are put in the bcw two row holder. im close to 40,000 different raiders cards.