In a recent household move across the country, I used an Inventory management subscription service called Sortly to catalog all of our boxes. This turned out to be an amazing system which, along with my iphone and a Dymo label printer, allowed me to catalog our entire household very quickly. With many of our belongings in storage, this database makes finding particular items relatively easy.
Which brings me to my current problem. We are currently still in short-term housing in the new state and I still use the inventory system, but not enough to justify Shortlyās month cost of $39. What I would love to do is either build my own system using QR codes or else find some other software that can basically do the same thing but is more of a one-time fee rather than a monthly subscription.
My requirements are:
- Be able to generate inventory database records and associate their URLs to QR codes from my phone.
- Be able to scan a box or itemās QR code and see its contents in the database.
- Be able to associate photos with a database record.
- Be able to search the database from my phone or desktop.
- Be able to print labels to a Dymo label printer (ideally from the phone, but if only from desktop, thatās fine).
I am a programmer and a scripter and am not afraid of writing code, if itās needed. But before going full-scale custom software to do this, I thought I should check with the hive and see if thereās anyone out there who has done anything like this before.
2 Likes
You might want to look at this. https://upcdatabase.org/
Itās not really for your own upc-codes but it has an api for looking up upc-codes and adding to their database
Now that Iām reading your post more closely I see that my comment was way off.
But the link might be useful for othersā¦
Very cool! Perhaps not necessary for this project, but good to know about.
I used the wrong words in my initial post. I should have said QR code ā because of course Iām not looking up merchandise information, but really just these mobile codes that can associate a physical object with a URL.
And now Iāve fixed my post so it wonāt be so confusing with the wrong term. 
Would Airtable work for this?
Your QR codes could be links to record (a box) within a table āboxesā. Then you could have a second table āitemsā where each item is associated with a box. Airtable is pretty flexible, so if youāre looking for āZen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenanceā you could specify who it belongs to (e.g. you, a partner, a dog, etc.), what kind of item it is (such as āBookā or āKitchenwareā), and of course descriptions, photos, etc.
4 Likes
I looked at Airtable for a job and decided in the end to update my copy of Filemaker. I live my life in Filemaker and FM Pro with FM Go might work for you. Hefty one-off cost, and some time required to build it, but it offers so much more usefulness in life that I reckon itās worth it. For a relatively simple solution like this, with QR code support on your phone, might just work.
You know, I wasnāt thinking about Airtable because I know itās a monthly charge service, which is the thing Iām trying to get away from, but after looking at their pricing I see they do have a free tierā¦not super familiar with Airtable, so I will definitely look into this. Thanks for the pointer!
I love Filemaker. Itās such a beautiful and fun app. Iāve never bought it, but Iāve played with trials here and there. My main issue with Filemaker isā¦is there a way to get URLs for individual records?
Another option that might be worth checking out is the Home Inventory app. I donāt believe the current version has this option, however I did briefly play with the v4 (āUnder My Roofā) beta and believe it does have a QR-code-based āMoving Boxesā feature which sounds like it might do what you need. Iām not sure that it prints the labels but I envisage that that could be a separate solution in this case.
Obviously being beta software you may or may not want to test it out right at the moment, but I thought Iād at least pop this as a note here for anyone that might be looking for something similar in the future.
(For the non-beta version, the Mac version is included in SetApp. The iOS app is somewhat limited in functionality at the moment, but the v4 beta looks more promising.)
1 Like
Iāve seen this app before and forgot about it. I will check it out. Thanks!