If you have a physical media collection for movies, TV shows, games, music, or something else, you’ve probably wondered “do I already have this?” while shopping. There’s an easy way to solve this problem: make a simple list.
There are many apps and services intended for tracking your collection of movies, games, music, and other media across digital and physical formats. Those are useful tools, especially the ones with the ability to add extra metadata, but they aren’t strictly necessary. If you just want to know what you already own, so you can quickly check you aren’t about to buy the same movie or game again, you can go for a more basic solution.
Making the List
I recently went through my entire physical collection of movies, TV shows, and Nintendo Wii games, and added them to an Excel spreadsheet—I still have my other physical games and music CDs to go through. I put them all in one big pile, and for each piece of media, I added the title and format as a row in the spreadsheet.
I made my list an Excel sheet, because it’s synchronized across my phone and computers with OneDrive, and it gives me the option of creating fun graphs for my collection. You don’t have to be quite as fancy as that, though. A simple list in your favorite notes app will work the same, as long as the app has a search function for text. Stick with whatever solution you like best, so keeping it up to date won’t be a pain.
In theory, you can speed up the manual process by taking a picture of your media collection with chatbot apps like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, then asking one of them to create a list with each title as a list item. However, generative AI chatbots can make mistakes, and I didn’t want to end up buying the same movie again because the AI missed one, so I didn’t go that route.
The process of going through my entire media collection had a few other benefits. I found out I had a few movies with missing discs, and there were a few movie digital codes I never redeemed. There was also one Blu-ray movie where the plastic case had cracked and was falling apart, so I ordered some replacement cases on eBay for that movie and any others that break in the future.
I also wanted to catalogue my collection of Wii games because I successfully installed USB Loader GX on my Wii, which allows discs to be backed up to USB storage (and then played without the disc). As I checked each game, I backed it up through USB Loader GX and added its backup status to the list item.
The one catch to a manual system is that you have to keep it up to date. If you don’t remember to add each new movie, game, or other media you acquire to the list, the list becomes less useful. Consider setting a monthly recurring reminder to check your recent purchases or gifts for anything that needs to be added.
I’m not organizing my digital media collection in a similar list, because it’s usually possible to check what I own from my phone or computer. I can see which Xbox games I’ve bought digitally through the ‘Owned’ list in the Xbox app. Every digital purchase of a TV show has been through YouTube/Google TV or Fandango at Home (previously known as Vudu), and I can check those in a few clicks or taps from anywhere.
My digital movie purchases are spread out across a few different platforms, but I have Movies Anywhere connected to all my accounts. I can check which movies I own (and watch) through the Movies Anywhere app or website.
Unfortunately, Movies Anywhere still doesn’t support TV shows, so you still have to check your TV purchases through the individual services. If your digital purchases are spread across many different services that are difficult or impossible to automatically merge, a list for those might be a good idea. I’m personally not going that far, though.
