Personal catalog

Everything worth keeping track of.

You put it somewhere sensible. That was two years and one house move ago. Photograph your things once, and Thingfile remembers where they went.

Open source, self-hosted, and honest about still being in development.

Features

Built for the boxes you already have

Storage units, garages, moving day, the loft. Your things reliably outlive your memory of where you put them.

Point, shoot, done

A shelf, a box, the serial number on the back of the router. The photo stays with the item, so "which model was it?" stops being a question you answer by going and looking.

Findable two years later

Search the name, narrow by category, or go by whatever you scribbled at the time: "garage shelf 3", "lent to Dave". A catalog earns its keep on the day you need it, not the day you make it.

No signal, no problem

Storage units are concrete boxes, and concrete eats bars. Your whole catalog is already on the phone, so it searches fine down there. Add things too, and it sorts itself out when you resurface.

The manual, not the drawer

Attach the PDF, the warranty, the receipt. When the dishwasher starts blinking a code at you, the manual is on the dishwasher, not in the drawer with the dead batteries and the takeaway menus.

Notes that fit your things

Serial numbers, which shelf, what it cost, who borrowed it and when. No fixed form to fight with, because your things do not share a shape.

Phone in the garage, laptop after

The same catalog on iOS, Android and the web, all talking to the server you run. Catalog it while you pack; tidy it up later with a proper keyboard.

How it works

Three steps, and then you get to forget

The whole point of writing something down is not having to hold on to it.

1

Point and shoot

Photograph the thing. Or the whole shelf, if you are feeling ambitious.

2

Let it have a go

It proposes a name, a category and tags. Fix what it got wrong. It will get some wrong.

3

Forget about it

Until a cold garage, eighteen months later, on a phone with one bar. That is the actual test.

It is your stuff. Keep it that way.

Thingfile runs on your own hardware. No account with us, no service in the middle, nothing of yours on anyone else's disk. And if you ever want out, the whole catalog comes with you as CSV or JSON.