Based on a short-lived topic (My Collection - How do you guys have your discs organized?), I'm a little curious how people here -- some with collection in the thousands -- find a specific title in a reasonable time!

There might be more choices to the poll, but it's the best I could think of.

Julien

I have anime on its own shelves, and beyond that I group titles first by series/franchise/significant creator, and then sort the groups by release date of the first title in each group. That's the general principle, anyway; in practice I might put something in an odd place because e.g. I need a hard box at the end of a row to keep the sleeves vertical, or a box might be too tall so it goes up top. I accept that my system is basically a non-deterministic sorting algorithm that's only implemented in my brain.

Fun stuff !
I also separate by U.S. domestic and Japanese titles. Yup, I keep them apart.

And, as well, keep titles for sale separate from private collection for the most part.

Doing a serious inventory of entire collection in 2024 if all goes as planned, and hopefully FLYING TERRAPIN store will be reopened for business as my new home construction is half-way completed !

Cheers to the membership !

I avoid sorting things too specifically. If I had 20,000 movies it would be different but I only have like 600 or so on LD. I’ve learned over the years from observing other collectards that if you know exactly where to find the movies/records/games/books you’re looking for that you won’t even touch the stuff in between. It takes me at least five minutes to find anything and in that time I handle many other discs that often I end up going with instead of the thing I originally went looking for.

I do have sections though, within which nothing is alphabetized or otherwise sorted.

Mainstream Hollywood: the biggest section. Everything from Birth of a Nation to The Dictator, Star Wars, Bond, 42nd Street, Woody Allen, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Kids: this is the “kids” section for my kid, so yeah it’s Disney and Tom & Jerry and Muppets and Loony Tunes but also stuff like 2001 which my kid really likes.

Crap: this is where I put stuff I know for sure I’ll never ever watch. It’s not necessary bad, often it’s technically great, but stuff that is primarily violent and anti-human makes me sick. I just gave someone a stack of this 8” high a while back so currently the crap tank is empty. The next time I get someone else’s collection it will begin to fill up again. Here you’ll find anything from I Spit On Your Grave to Scorsese’s Oscar award winning gang exploitation oeuvre. Everything QT ever did, most hentai, Cosby, Elm Street.

Music: all the classical and opera is in one section, the pop stuff is separate. These sections aren’t big.

Digital Surround: another small section, sometimes I just want to demo 5.1 on LD so all the DD and DTS stuff is there.

Criterion: needs its own section, obviously.

Cinemadisc: see; Criterion

Anime: the second biggest section and maybe by physical volume the largest since some titles are as many as 13 discs. I have the following subcategories: Gundam, Macross, Ghibli, English-friendly, and “everything else”.

Asian Trash Cinema: one of the most potent sections, martial arts, Gamera, Robot Detective, Jackie Chan, etc.

Box Sets: these guys are huge and they go wherever they actually fit.

I should really sort my discs but just cannot be arsed. They arrive. Go on a shelf and sit there until I decide to watch an LD and then spend about 3 hours trying to find the disc I was looking for, finding it and then giving up because at that point I may as well go to bed or do something else as I spent so much time looking for the disc.

I simply embrace the chaos.

The LDs I have for sale are in baskets and loosely sorted. In general I sort alphabetically. For my DVDs/BDs anime and criterion are separated. The anime is a bit further sorted from there. Series that have an English dub option* are first, then movies/oavs, then everything that is English subtitles only and in a few rare cases Japanese releases with no English subs that I got, ripped and added subtitles to.

*I don't remember the last time I watched something dubbed but I started sorting this way years ago and hell if I'm going to stop now.

Hi there, long time no see

Personally, I have my 200 or so discs sorted in 4 different rows on a shelf, from top to bottom :

My favorite films and discs. I also put the few NTSC discs I have and the other "uncommon" things to me like the dts, music and the non-boxset animes.

The 3 other rows are more or less organized from "best" to "worst" manufacturer/distributor in terms of disc quality (picture, sound...)
It goes :

-All Pioneer and Warner discs
-Columbia, tristar, sony, fox and a few other
-Then all the more or less crappy delta video and other small and random distributor (not always bad quality discs).

All the discs are in no particular order within those different rows though, I just more or less know where a disc is when looking for it.

Oh and the big boxsets go wherever I can put them