The thought of going through all of my storage boxes to catalog hundreds or thousands of items so that I might search for them one day via a web UI seems a lot less productive than simply knowing that old USB supplies are in the “USB junk” box and Christmas decorations are in the “Christmas decorations” box
I think it becomes more useful as you accumulate stuff - I get frustrated when my wife buys crap on Amazon that we already have. So while I don’t have the time or energy to sort everything in our house, I am beginning to catalogue things as we buy or find them in the hope it becomes more useful over time to find things we rarely use and/or avoid re-buying excess items
Any suggestions for alternatives while we’re at it?
I’m currently using Google Keep (don’t judge) with special title format and gotta move out of there.
I’ve been attempting to test shelf.nu . they have a docker container but not working for me after a bit of tinkering. What made me want to try shelfNU is they sell QR codes you can put on boxes and assign that as an entity and say these items are there so it’s easy to find what’s in what storage container.
That’s nice. I suppose you could do the same by printing a bunch of UUIDs on QR codes and add the UUIDs to the respective location in the system.
What I’m doing is even easier. I use an X-Y coordinate system. I assign a letter to a storage unit, e.g. a Kallax is assigned “A”. Then each bin horizontally is X and each bin vertically is Y in A:X:Y. Then fairly easily I can determine that the third bin on the second shelf is A:3:2. That’s short enough to type in a search field. It’s also easy enough to locate a shelf coming from A:X:Y. If the shelf has only one dimension, like a bunch of drawers, I use just one number. This system is fairly easy to learn and eliminates the need for physically tagging every bin or drawer. Doesn’t work for unstructured storage, like boxes on the floor or other shameful things that we all have. 😄
Homebox has this capability too, you can generate QR codes for assets and scan it later to identify whatever’s inside.
Oh interesting, thanks for the information, I did poke around homeboxs documentation but didn’t see anything mentioning QR codes where as ShelfNU has it as a main feature. Since I can’t seem to get the latter up on unraid may have to givehome box a spin soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventory_management_software
Here’s a good list
