A project I’ve been ideating on for a while is a way to log my household physical media. My spouse and I have been rebuilding a DVD/Blu-ray collection for the past few years, and have a pretty extensive library of books, comics, games, and CDs from past eras.
Like a lot of Xennials my memories of childhood mimic films like Empire Records and Clerks. We all either worked at, wanted to work at, or regularly hung out around movie rental stores, comic book shops, and record shops. It’s a nostalgia that naturally leans into building a physical media library.
To get started on this project I opened up Miro and started a sticky stack. I began adding thoughts to a few stickies. Ultimately I landed on this collection. Very loose, basic ideas.
From here I ironed out all the fields I would want to collect, and began creating a breakdown of what category each field will appear on.
This is completed before any conversation with AI. Claude can code, but can’t read your mind. The more information you can provide up front, the better first result you will receive. In my experience this also applies to human coders.
Claude walked me through a few set up items I haven’t created a muscle memory for yet, they were easier and less frustrating to set up than they were with Bookathon – a project which properly introduced me to Git, setting up a local PHP server to test with, and a plethora of registrations and tools I didn’t realize I’d have to deal with.
A few unplanned items I’ll be adding:
- An import option that provides a template the user can download. This template will match the export.
- A “Physical Location” field for users to put their own library system’s info in. This could be a room “Office” “Living Room”, or maybe a personal filing system.
- A more original design. Right now it is defaulting to the same design used for Bookathon, which is fine, but I’d like this one to feel more like a record shop or similar.
- Option to bring over your owned books from Bookathon. This will require going back into Bookathon and adding a checkbox for something like “Owns a physical copy”
- A social media friendly snapshot with counts, most recently watched, most recently added. I’ll probably design a small template in Miro or Canva, leaving a space to indicate where the cover photos should appear. I’ll post that template here when I get to that point, it will be towards the end.
My biggest unknown, and biggest concern, is related to the Photo to Listing feature. I want users to be able to take a photo of a DVD cover (for example), and have AI try to fill out relevant fields based on the image. The way we are building this will first look for a barcode – this does not require AI, but does require APIs to respond in a timely manner, some of which may not always play nice because I am very cheap. The hope and the worry is AI will kick in if it doesn’t see a barcode. I am looking forward to seeing how many tokens this eats up. It may not actually be worth it to keep any actual AI functionality in the app itself.