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, or go by place: Garage › Shelf 3 › the blue bin, and everything filed beneath it comes along. Or by whatever you scribbled at the time: "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.
Share the shelf, not the house
Put the camping gear in a collection and invite whoever else goes. Some can only look, some can add and fix. They say yes before they are in, and the rest of your things stay yours.
Bring the spreadsheet
Already kept a list? Import the CSV. If one row is wrong, nothing goes in and you are told which row, so you never end up with half a list. Then tidy fifty things at once: refile, retag, move or delete.
How many, not just whether
Six of the same bolt is one item with a count, not six items. Photograph a two-pack of cables and it comes in as the cable, times two, with the length and wattage read off the box.
What is it actually worth?
Keep a table of the things you deal in, which version is the good one, and what each goes for: new, used, untested, for parts. Note a sold price when you see one. Then ask what your copy would fetch, straight from the item.
The deal finds you
Save an eBay search and it checks the live listings for you, ranked against the prices you know, and the phone buzzes when one is a bargain. Bidding on something? Set your max, and it tells you where you stand. Buying still happens on eBay.
Let your other tools in
Give a notes app, a script or an AI assistant its own key: read only, or allowed to add things. Each one is named, made with your password, and revoked in a click. Assistants that speak MCP get a server of their own, which looks things up and, if you let it, keeps your saved searches.
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.
Point and shoot
Photograph the thing. Or the whole shelf, if you are feeling ambitious.
Let it have a go
It proposes a name, a category and tags. Fix what it got wrong. It will get some wrong.
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.