About Thingfile
Thingfile is a catalog of your own belongings, running on your own server. You photograph a thing, it gets a name and a category and whatever notes matter to you, and from then on you can find it again.
It exists because of a specific and very ordinary kind of annoyance: knowing for a fact that you own the thing, knowing you were sensible about where you put it, and having no idea where that was.
Who it is for
Anyone whose things have outgrown their memory. The storage unit you visit twice a year. The move where everything became forty numbered boxes and the numbers stopped meaning anything by box nine. The garage, the loft, the workshop, the craft room. Anywhere things go in and are not seen again until the day they are needed.
It is also, quietly, for the person who ends up sorting your things out one day. A catalog with photographs is a considerably kinder thing to inherit than a garage.
What it does
- Photographs. Every item can carry photos, taken on the phone or picked from your library.
- Suggests. Point the camera at several things at once and it picks out the separate objects, proposing a name, category and tags for each. You correct what it got wrong, and it does get some wrong.
- Attachments. Manuals, receipts and warranties live on the item rather than in a drawer.
- Search. By name, category, or anything you noted at the time. Sorted however you like, and paged, so a large catalog stays quick.
- Offline. The whole catalog is on your phone, so a storage unit with no signal is still searchable, and things you add down there sync when you surface.
- Export. CSV or JSON, whenever you like. It is your catalog and it should be able to leave.
What it is not
It is not asset management for a business, not a barcode scanner for a warehouse, and not a marketplace. It will not value your things, will not help you sell them, and has no interest whatsoever in your contacts.
You run it
Thingfile is self-hosted, like the rest of what we build. There is no account with us, no hosted service, and nothing of yours on our servers. You run the server, and the apps talk to it. What we publish is the software: a C++ HTTP/JSON backend on PostgreSQL, a React web app, and iOS and Android clients.
It is MIT licensed and in development. The service code is not published yet; when it is, this page will point at it rather than collect an email address in the meantime.