What's new in Movie Collector? (page 3)

We changed the Add Movies screen so you now see the movie poster if we don’t have a front cover available for you. We also got rid of some bugs today, check it out:

New:

• Drag & drop of images from a webbrowser was broken

Fixed:

• Drag & drop of images from a webbrowser was broken
• Grouping on “My Rating” didn’t work sometimes
• Some year entries weren’t set correctly
• Removing entries from the Link screen was not possible with keyboard
• Edit in List behaviour modified for dropdown field types
• Add Episode: When you click “Next”, the episode title is now selected so you can quickly enter a title.
• Add Box Set by barcode: when searching for 1 single barcode, you can now add it correctly as multiple movies, or one single entry using the two add buttons.

Changed:

• Bigger buttons for the find cover screen and options screen,
• You can now also find duplicates based on CLZ Movie ID, IMDb URL and “Title & Format”

Fixed:

• Filter Screen: Drag/Drop of pre-set filters could give an Access Violation error
• Duplicate Finder:
  • Updated the standard set of columns (you can also pick your own using the column button top right)
  • After searching for duplicates twice, the screen could show “0 found” even if it found duplicates
• When running the program on 2 or more screens with different DPI settings, you could get a “List Index out of Bounds” error
• You can now bypass the “Lock File” warning if it appears on start up
• Add buttons in the Add Screen are now disabled while data is being downloaded to prevent an Access Violation
• Filtering on number of IMDb Votes “less or greater than” didn’t work correctly.

We’re on a roll! Here’s yet another BIG update of your Movie Collector for Windows software, bringing two more huge improvements, again made possible by our new content licensing agreement with IMDB:

1. Add Movies straight from IMDb, using the IMDb Number or URL
2. Now get “official” IMDb Cast and Crew lists for ALL movies in our Core

1. Add Movies by IMDb Number or URL

In this version, there is new “IMDb” tab in the Add Movies screen, for finding and adding movies straight from their IMDb Nr or URL.

Can’t find a movie in our Core? But it is on IMDb?
Then just find the movie on IMDb and copy either the IMDb Nr or the entire UMDb URL. Then go to the new IMDb tab and paste the Nr or URL into the search box, and click Search.

The movie entry will then be retrieved from IMDb automatically AND added to our Core, so that you can then immediately Add it to your database!

(Don’t worry, if it turns out the movie WAS already in our Core, it will automatically just return the existing entry, it will never cause duplicate entries in our Core.)

IMPORTANT: this new Add by IMDb feature always requires an active Service Plan!

Search by IMDb Nr:

Or just paste in the complete IMDB URL of the movie:

2. Official IMDb Cast and Crew list for all movies

Starting with this version, the Movie Collector software now downloads the “official” cast and crew from IMDb, that is the top 25 actors and the full list of Producers, Directors, Writers, Photography and Musicians.

Also, the cast list now comes with IMDb links for ALL cast members!

TIP 1: set the Max Actors / Crew members to 25

1. Go to menu “Tools > Options”.
2. Click on “Data and Images” and select “Download settings for data and images”
3. Change both the amount of Actors and Crew members to 25

TIP 2: Set Update from Core settings for Cast and Crew to “REPLACE”

If you wish to update your existing movie entries with the maximum amount of cast/crew entries:

1. First, go to the same screen as above and under “Update from CLZ Core”, next to “Cast” and “Crew” set the dropdown to “REPLACE” and click OK to save your changes.
2. Back in your main screen: select the movies you want to update, right click, then choose Update from Core.

( After updating, make sure to set setting back to “Update empty fields only”. )

A couple of fixes for Movie Collector Mac today with squashed bugs that you reported to us:

Fixed:

• Add Screen: Searching an IMDb URL or Title gave invalid XML if they contained “&” in them
• Add Screen: Barcode scanning with CLZ Barry or CueCat didn’t work
• Link with CLZ Core screen didn’t find any results
• Editing the personal rating in the template and edit screens missed the star images
• Templates stopped working if an “&” was in some of the fields

We’re on a roll! Here’s yet another BIG update of your Movie Collector for Mac software, with 3 important additions!

1. Add Movies straight from IMDb, using the IMDb Number or URL
2. Now get “official” IMDb Cast and Crew lists for ALL movies in our Core
3. Also, new support for 12 digital movie formats, complete with icons and logos

1. Add Movies by IMDb Number or URL

More goodies made possible by our agreement with IMDb! Introduced today, a new “IMDb” tab in the Add Movies screen for finding and adding movies straight from their IMDb Nr or URL.

Can’t find a movie in our Core? But it is on IMDb?
Then just find the movie on IMDb and copy either the IMDb Nr or the entire UMDb URL. Then go to the new IMDb tab and paste the Nr or URL into the search box, and click Search.

The movie entry will then be retrieved from IMDb automatically AND added to our Core, so that you can then immediately Add it to your database!

(Don’t worry, if it turns out the movie WAS already in our Core, it will automatically just return the existing entry, it will never cause duplicate entries in our Core.)

IMPORTANT: this new Add by IMDb feature always requires an active Service Plan!

Search by IMDb Nr:

Or just paste in the complete IMDB URL of the movie:

2. Official IMDb Cast and Crew list for all movies

Starting with this version, the Movie Collector software now downloads the “official” cast and crew from IMDb, that is the top 25 actors and the full list of Producers, Directors, Writers, Photography and Musicians.

Also, the cast list now comes with IMDb links for ALL cast members!

TIP 1: set the Max Actors / Crew members to 25

1. Go to menu “Movie Collector > Preferences”.
2. Click on “Data and Images” and select “Download settings for data and images”
3. Change both the amount of Actors and Crew members to 25

TIP 2: Set Update from Core settings for Cast and Crew to “REPLACE”

If you wish to update your existing movie entries with the maximum amount of cast/crew entries:

1. First, go to the same screen as above and under “Update from CLZ Core”, next to “Cast” and “Crew” set the dropdown to “REPLACE”.
2. Then select the movies you want to update, right click, then choose Update from Core.

( After updating, make sure to set setting back to “Update empty fields only”. )

3. New options and icons for digital movie formats

With digital movie formats becoming more popular, we have decided to add the most popular ones to the Format list, all with nice new icons and logos.

Now available as new Format choices:

• Amazon Prime Video
• Apple iTunes
• Google Play
• Vudu
• Roku
• Microsoft Movies & TV
• Playstation Video
• Netflix
• Youtube
• Hulu
• Disney+
• Movies Anywhere

Some fixes today for the Find Duplicates screen:

Fixed

• Keep and Remove buttons weren’t sizing correctly on high DPI screens
• Renamed “Exact Duplicate” option to “All Fields” to make its purpose more clear

Based on user feedback we found out users were looking for and expecting a tool to find duplicate entries in their database. Some way to find out if you’ve accidentally added multiple versions of the same movie, but perhaps with a different format or barcode.

After quite a few requests and discussions with users about this, to find out how they got duplicates and what they would expect from such a Duplicate Finder tool, it’s here today: Find Duplicate entries in your database!

New: Find Duplicate Movies

Click menu Tools > Maintenance > Find Duplicates to begin.

Then select which field to find duplicates on. You can find duplicates based on:

• Title
• Title & Release Year
• Barcode
• Index
• Exact Duplicate

Click “Find Duplicates” and see what it comes up with. Use the blue “Keep” button to keep a group of duplicates, or use the red “Remove” button to remove a duplicate!

If you click “Remove all duplicates automatically” the program will remove all duplicate entries and will only keep 1 single entry (the oldest one) in your database.

Tip: use the columns button, top right, to set up the columns you’d like to see!

Because the version we released yesterday was built with a new Xcode, the program automatically supported Mojave’s “Dark Mode”. Unfortunately, we all run “Light Mode” here, and we didn’t see that the program looked completely wrong in Dark Mode!

We do plan to support Dark Mode on Mojave, but this is a different project and will be addressed later this year.

Fixed:

• Mojave’s Dark Mode made the program look bad so we switched the program to light mode for now.
• Export to XML, Text, and other export functions were broken
• Images Shelves styles were broken.

Trial Mode improvements:

• Bigger “+” button on the default toolbar.
• Improved “My CLZ Account” messaging when logging in with a CLZ Account.
• New hints to Sync with CLZ Cloud after adding some items.
• Removed the ugly blue “hint box” that appeared when starting with an empty database.

Only supports macOS 10.9 or higher

This is the first version to not support macOS 10.8 Mountain Lion anymore.

To stay current with Apple we’ve just updated to Xcode (the software used to create Movie Collector for macOS). In order to do this we had to drop support for macOS 10.8 (Mountain Lion) from 2012 as Apple doesn’t support it anymore in Xcode.

If you still use macOS 10.8, make sure to not upgrade Movie Collector to this version.

Fixed:

• Auto-mark custom images didn’t flag items as “dirty” for the sync.
• Drag and drop image on Details Panel to change the front cover was broken.
• Index number sometimes didn’t increment correctly.
• Changing order of movies in a box set could crash the program.

New options and icons for digital movie formats

With digital movie formats becoming more popular, we have decided to add the most popular ones as default choices in the Format list, all with nice new list icons and logos for the details panel.

Now available as new Format choices:

• Amazon Prime Video
• Apple iTunes
• Google Play
• Vudu
• Roku
• Microsoft Movies & TV
• Playstation Video
• Netflix
• Youtube
• Hulu
• Disney+

New Format picker drop-down in Add Movies from Core

The new format choices have now also been added to the Format picker in the Add Movies from Core screen. Just click the blue Format button and pick from the format choices, nicely separated in “Physical” and “Digital” sections:

Renamed Blu-ray and 4K UHD formats

To conform with the more commonly used naming, we have renamed two formats:

• “Blu-ray Disc” to just “Blu-ray”
• “Ultra HD Blu-ray” to just “4K UHD”

Also, the 4K UHD format now has a new icon!

More tweaks to the Add button in Add Movies from Core

We already worked on this area in the previous update, but we were still not completely satisfied. So more tweaks to the Add button in the Add Movies from Core screen today:

• All Collection Status values are now available, including “For Sale” and “On Order”!
• The little popup menu now indicates the selected value with a checkmark.
• The Add button itself now says “Add to Collection” or “Add to Wishlist”.

The Movie Collector v19 release was just 6 weeks ago, but I have another big update for you now. Depending on how much of an IMDb junkie you are, today’s v19.1 update may even be a bigger deal than v19 itself 🙂

What’s new in Movie Collector v19.1

As you probably know, we have signed a more comprehensive (and also much more expensive) content licensing agreement with IMDb, which gives us access to more and fresher IMDb data.

Today we’ve released the first new features made possible by this new agreement!

New: IMDb Votes field

This new field indicates the number of votes on which the IMDb Rating is based. It is a good indication of 1. how popular the movie is and 2. how trustworthy the rating is.

• The IMDb Votes field is automatically filled in when you Add a Movie from Core. (Note: similar to IMDb Ratings and Links, getting IMDb Votes from Core requires an active Service Plan)
• It is also shown in the yellow IMDb box in your movie details panel, right below the logo and rating (for the Flex, QuickSilver and Carbon templates).
• Tip: add the IMDb Votes as a column in your list, so that easily see for all your movies or even sort on it to order your list by the movie’s popularity.

New: Update your IMDb Ratings and Votes in one go

The new IMDb content license gives us daily updates of the IMDb Ratings and Votes, so let’s make use of that daily fresh data now!

• Select some (or all) movies in your list, then right click and choose Update IMDb Ratings / Votes from the menu.
• This will connect to our Core and retrieve fresh IMDb Ratings and Votes for all selected movies.
• Don’t worry, this won’t take long. We have implemented a super efficient system that can update ratings/votes in chunks of 100 movies in one go.
• When done, it will report the number of movies it has updated the Ratings and Votes for.
• Note: using the “Update IMDb Ratings/Votes” feature requires an active Service Plan.

Other changes

• Renamed format “Blu-ray Disc” to “Blu-ray”
• Renamed format “Ultra HD Blu-ray” to “4K UHD”
• Updated the format icon for 4K UHD

With the big feature updates behind us (multi-collections, image syncing, Flex template, IMDb Votes, etc…), it is time for some smaller tweaks that were requested by our loyal users:

• More compact toolbar layout,to save screen space
• No more annoying Add to Collection / Wish List popup in Add Movies screen
• New “Transparent” styles for the Flex template, to show off your backdrops

Read more

The Movie Collector v19 release was just 2 months ago, but I have another big update for you now. Depending on how much of an IMDb junkie you are, today’s v19.1 update may even be a bigger deal than v19 itself 🙂

What’s new in Movie Collector v19.1

As you probably know, we have signed a more comprehensive (and also much more expensive) content licensing agreement with IMDb, which gives us access to more and fresher IMDb data.

Today we’ve released the first new features made possible by this new agreement!

New: IMDb Votes field

This new field indicates the number of votes on which the IMDb Rating is based. It is a good indication of 1. how popular the movie is and 2. how trustworthy the rating is.

• The IMDb Votes field is automatically filled in when you Add a Movie from Core. (Note: similar to IMDb Ratings and Links, getting IMDb Votes from Core requires an active Service Plan)
• It is also shown in the yellow IMDb box in your movie details panel, right below the logo and rating (for the Flex, QuickSilver and Carbon templates).
• Tip: add the IMDb Votes as a column in your list, so that easily see for all your movies or even sort on it to order your list by the movie’s popularity.

New: Update your IMDb Ratings and Votes in one go

The new IMDb content license gives us daily updates of the IMDb Ratings and Votes, so let’s make use of that daily fresh data now!

• Select some (or all) movies in your list, then right click and choose Update IMDb Ratings/Votes from the menu.
• This will connect to our Core and retrieve fresh IMDb Ratings and Votes for all selected movies.
• Don’t worry, this won’t take long. We have implemented a super efficient system that can update ratings/votes in chunks of 100 movies in one go.
• When done, it will report the number of movies it has updated the Ratings and Votes for.
• Note: using the “Update IMDb Ratings/Votes” feature requires an active Service Plan.

Other changes

• Several tweaks to improve the trial mode experience:
  • Bigger “+ Add Movies” button on the default toolbar
  • Improved “My CLZ Account” messaging when logging in with a CLZ Account.
  • New hints to Sync with CLZ Cloud after adding some movies.
  • Removed the ugly blue “hint box” that appeared when starting with an empty database.
• FIXED: Occasional freeze/hang problems after a period of program inactivity.

New:

• You can now add the field “Custom Image” as a column to your list.

Fixed:

• Multiple Collections:
  • Importing XML would always import into the “first collection” instead of the selected collection.
  • Importing XML could cause a crash.
  • There were some issues with the order of multiple collections.
• A couple of Flex template fixes.
• The details template was always reset to Flex.
• “Custom Image” checkbox wasn’t checked when using Find Cover via Main Screen.

Fixed:

• Automatically syncing cover images could happen too often
• Edit Screens:
  • While using Next/Previous, the cursor position wasn’t always retained
  • After scanning an image, some of the buttons would sometimes not be enabled

Movie Collector version 19 has arrived! Here’s what’s new:

• Manage multiple “collections” within one database file
• Automatic Cloud-syncing of your own “custom” images
• Add Box Sets as a single database entry
• A new super-adaptive “Flex” template for the Details Panel
• IMDb features are back!

Read on for the full details:

Read more

Fixed:

• Some fields weren’t entirely visible
• The old Vee Eight template was missing the IMDb logo
  
  (tip: try the NEW Flex template via menu View > Details View Template > Flex!!)

• Submitting a movie to Core could give an error

Great news! We now have a new and more comprehensive content licensing agreement with IMDb, which means the IMDb features are back in your Movie Collector software!

IMDb features are back!

• When adding new movies, it automatically downloads IMDb Ratings and Links again.
• The IMDb Number field has been replaced with an IMDb URL field. Of course, your existing IMDb numbers have automagically been turned into IMDb URLs.
• In your movie details panel, the IMDb Ratings are shown in “IMDb yellow” again 🙂

The new IMDb content license is more comprehensive, so more IMDb related data and features are coming soon, including:

• Official cast and crew listings, straight from IMDb.
• A tool for updating all your IMDb Ratings with fresh ratings from IMDb.

HOWEVER: Because the new license is also very expensive, we have decided to only deliver IMDb Ratings and Links to users who are on a valid, non-expired Update Plan.

Fixed for 64-bit version: Image scanning and web-cam scanning

Right after the release of v19, we started receiving reports from users that their image scanners would not be found when using the 64-bit version. Other users reported that the web-cam scanning would not work anymore.

A temporary work-around has been to use the 32-bit version of version 19.

In the meantime, our Windows developer Joe has been working hard to get both of these problems resolved and I am happy to report that both have been fixed in today’s version 19.0.8:

• 64-bit version now uses WIA to connect with image scanners. When acquiring, make sure to select the WIA driver for your scanner, not TWAIN.
• Scanning barcodes with your webcam scanner is working again.

If you have been using the 32-bit version as a workaround, please switch to the 64-bit version again (this is a choice during installation).

Then, please let us know your findings, is everything working again?

IMDb, IMDb.COM, and the IMDb logo are trademarks of IMDb.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

We fixed an issue with index numbers automatically incrementing when they shouldn’t.

Fixed:

• Custom Image checkbox wasn’t always checked in certain situations (e.g. unrecognized barcode screen and drag/drop image on the details panel)
• Images for items that don’t have a cover in Core didn’t upload automatically
• Images for items that don’t have a cover in your CLZ Cloud didn’t upload automatically
• Got rid of a couple of access violations in the main, filter and find cover screens
• Edit Screen: Covers tab: tabs weren’t high enough
• Import from Other Database:
  • Added 2 progress bars to keep track of the import
  • In rare cases you could get an empty extra collection tab after an import
• Fixed a rare “Range Check Error” happening for big databases
• Box Sets: After editing a movie that is part of a box set, the navigation of finding the different movies in the box set could get lost.
• Field Default setting for “Region” was resetting to “nothing” on each new start up.

Pending our discussion with IMDb, it was necessary to update Movie Collector for Windows with the following changes:

• The program does not download/update IMDb Ratings or IMDb links anymore.
• All occurrences of the “IMDb” name and logo have been removed.

We hope to reach an agreement with IMDb soon, so that we can re-enable the above features.
Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Pending our discussion with IMDb, it was necessary to update Movie Collector for Mac with the following changes:

• The program does not download/update IMDb Ratings or IMDb links anymore.
• All occurrences of the “IMDb” name and logo have been removed.

We hope to reach an agreement with IMDb soon, so that we can re-enable the above features.
Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Stability

We have fixed various stability issues in the program to get rid of some more access violation errors that were happening for a couple of users. We also fixed a problem where “File > Open Database” didn’t refresh the main screen to show the opened file.

• Got rid of some Access Violation errors
• “File / Open database” could show an empty screen

32-bit and 64-bit option

We’ve found that when running our program in 64-bit mode, some 3rd party external devices will not work or talk to the program such as:

• TWAIN image scanners
• Some barcode scanners
• Webcams (for barcode scanning)

If you run into issues where you your TWAIN image scanner, or your barcode scanner won’t connect or work, this is usually caused by the drivers of these devices which are not 64-bit compatible, and thus can’t talk to your Collectorz program.

We’re trying to look for a way to make them talk to the 64-bit version, but for now, to work around this, redownload the software from your CLZ Account page and during installation choose to install the 32-bit version!

DPI fix for Add Movies screen

The new “Add as Single Movie” or “Add [x] Movies” buttons for box sets weren’t scaling correctly on screens with high DPI settings. Fixed now!

We noticed a small issue in the new Flex detail templates where plot descriptions could be cut off wrong. Fixed in this latest build.

We also fixed a rare problem that could throw a “List index out of bounds” error on certain popups.

Fixed:

• “Clean” templates were missing
• Adding movies from files didn’t refresh the movie list correctly