As I walk around my home or dig through my attic, I am constantly reminded that I posses many items that are part of our family history. Right now, my kids aren’t interested in decorating their homes with those items (and frankly, I keep them to limited areas myself) but, one day, they might to pass them on to their children and grandchildren along with the stories behind them.
For a long time, I have been trying to figure out the best way to document these items. I start with my end goal in mind: a photographic record of the items, with a description of each one and, in some cases, a note about which of my spawn should receive it so there’s no arguing someday when I’m not there to step in!
But the steps to get to that end goal seem onerous. Writing it all on paper or even digitally as I walk around my house and take pictures is one way, but then how do I cross-reference the notes with my photo library? So I set out to determine the specs for my project.
Project Specs
I’m not really into phone apps. But in this case, I think it would be convenient to walk around the house with my camera, take a picture, write stuff down, then go on to the next one. Done and done. Using a computer for notes and a phone for pictures would be clumsy. If I have to take photos one day, then sit down and organize, annotate, and tag them another day, it will simply never happen. So making this work on my phone is important.
As for the layout and format, I want a spreadsheet or database. The organizational features will be helpful (sorting and filtering). Yet the solution must also have an easy way to take photos and keep them with the data.
My last qualification for this project — and it’s a big one — is twofold: the final database or spreadsheet must be in a standardized format AND the data must be my own.
There are apps for home inventory (for moving or insurance purposes) but how many of them are future-proof? You make your lovely database and then the developer goes under and you can’t access your data anymore. Or your data lives only in the app or in the cloud in a proprietary format and you can’t download it to use in a different platform.
Testing The Options
Wanting to stick with platforms I’m already connected to, I first tried downloading Google Sheets to my phone. With this approach, I was able to take a photo directly into a cell. But the images were tiny, and putting them over cells made the rest of the spreadsheet awkward. I never found a way to change the size of a cell and keep the image inside of it.
Still staying in the Googleverse, I considered Google Keep (which is a wonderful note taking app) because it has the convenient feature of being able to take a picture in a note and then write or speak notes to go with it. However, there is no organizational structure in Keep. And I already have a long history of notes in the app. These can be exported to HTML with Google Takeout, but there’s no way to export ONLY the notes from my family artifacts inventory project. And HTML is not an ideal way to preserve this content for future generations.
Next, I considered Obsidian–which is not a database, but it is my second brain for everything–hoping it would have a convenient photo-taking option, but alas, not yet (plenty of calls for it, so maybe someday).
Still thinking I could keep all of this data in Obsidian, I looked for a Markdown editor for my phone that would also take pictures. Then, I reasoned, I could export everything in .md format to my computer, along with links and photos, and I’d have them in Obsidian. Still not smooth and easy, but at least it would all live in my second brain. So I tried Joplin and Zettelnotes, since users of both apps said that it was easy to add photos to notes. Meh. Not so much. Uninstalled.
As I continued to search, I ran across an article from a moving company that provided some suggestions for apps to document the contents of your moving boxes. I expected a lot of hype and clickbait, but I actually found a few good options here.
And in the end, that’s where I found the winner: MementoDatabase.com
Here’s what I love:
- I can create my own database fields to exactly my specifications.
- One of the fields can be an “image” field, which adds a photo-taking option directly into the data entry process.
- One of the fields can be an “audio” field in case I want to record something about the item.
- My data is my own! I am not tied to a proprietary format or an app developer who might vanish one day.
- The resulting database can easily be exported to Google Sheets.
- The images and audio files are saved together in a folder on my Google Drive.
- Since Google’s formats are standardized, I can save my files on my own hard drive as a backup and open them in any spreadsheet program.
- There is a desktop option as well as Android and iOS.
- Sync is also available for a small charge and could be used temporarily, then stop when the project is complete.
Setup and Testing
I installed the app and intuitively set up my data fields in about 10 minutes. Then I ran a test by creating two entries with photos, and exported it to Google Sheets. PERFECT!
Just a few tweaks to my settings (for example, I want the resulting photos to be just a bit larger for clarity, but not so big that they take up a ton of space) and I’ll be ready to roll.
Now all I need to do is find the time to do the inventory project…
