A Movie Organizer to Help You Keep Track of Your Movies

Today I’d like to talk about the software I came across not so long ago. A friend of mine told me he liked his movie organizer software. I decided to give it a try and this is what I’ve learned so far.

All My Movies is a multi-lingual movie organizer. What is a movie organizer at all? Briefly, it’s software which helps to organize all sorts of films – VHS (if you still use them), DVDs, Blu-rays. The software includes all necessary info about the films – the genre, release date, the full cast, the directors, etc. The major advantage with movie organizers is that there’s no need to enter any movie info manually – everything is downloaded automatically from movie Internet databases – that is rather convenient.

I loaded my favorite TV series into the program in just 20 minutes, and now I have all the details about the actors at my fingertips. And it loaded my folder with AVI movie files without a problem, even though there are different video codecs in use in them.

What else appealed to me in this software?

First of all, its ease-of-use, because everything is intuitively clear where to find functionality, how to start, how to continue and when to finish.

Secondly, the view modes available in the program. It has something for everyone – the user is welcome to choose the template, the information depicted on the movie card, etc. Besides, there are cover thumbnails and virtual shelf modes, which make it a lot nicer to work with the library.

Thirdly, sorting and grouping options are rather impressive. Users with thousands of movies in store are offered to sort and group them by various criteria – that’s makes it real easy to manage large movie collections. It’s also possible to add personal marks and colored flags and filter the collection by those. For example, you particularly like certain films, so add the mark “My favourite” and filter the collection based on it. Done! You’ll be shown only the films with this mark.

Another point to mention is the program’s directories and their potential. I really like working with them. For example, the Name directory stores full information about actors and directors from all the films in the library. Each person’s card has the photo and biographical info, as well as filmography of the actor. And there are pop-up windows containing brief info and the photo.

The software is made by Bolide Software, who have been in business since 2003. As a result they claim to have frequent program updates and strong technical support. I haven’t had the need for support, but it is good to know it is available.

I haven’t found any serious drawbacks of the software. Like any movie organizer using online databases which often make changes on the website, All My Movies sometimes faces problems with those changes, but the good news is that they adjust to those changes rather quickly.

If you have experience of using All My Movies as the movie organizer, please share your opinion in the comments! If you’d like to try it, visit their website and download a 30-day free trial.

Update July 2011:

A new version of All My Movies is now available. Version 6.5 improves the user-friendliness of the program and adds some new functions to the software. To mention a few improvements:

• More online databases with more languages supported.
• Search on media location.
• Use Bing.com to search for movie covers.
• Search for TV series.
• Some bug fixes.

For a detailed list of the changes, please visit the website. If you are a movie collector, it is certainly worth your time to evaluate the 30-day trial version.

Update December 2012:

All My Movies is now available for the iPhone. The app is available in the AppStore and is currently compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch. An iPad and android version are planned for the near future. The mobile version of All My Movies allows users to synchronize the movie collection between their PC and their iPhone, giving access to the movie collection on the go.

The app is priced at $9.99.

Update January 2014:

Version 7.8 is out now. There are some new things as well as some fixes in this new version of AllMyMovies.

One of the fixes pertain to the import of movie details from IMDB, including the person details from IMDB.

Another improvement is that ratings from online databases are no longer rounded, but available as the actual value. The PDF export and printing options have also been improved. All in all, it seems the developers are really listing to the feedback to improve the software further.

Update April 2021:

The program is now at version 9.8 and is compatible with Windows versions from Vista till Windows 10.

New features include support for TV Series, and sharing your collection database across the network with other computers.

Full details of the changes in the latest version can be found at the website.