For a number of years now, we've (infrequently) updated a photographic inventory of our household items and stored it in a safe place. It started out as 35 mm photos, then moved to a video recording.
A few years ago, I started also keeping an inventory on an Excel spreadsheet. That allowed me to keep a record of what an item cost, where we bought it, and so on. It was still pretty hit and miss. My descriptions were never good enough (or consistent enough) to identify 4 different chairs, let alone 10 or 20 different necklaces (hers, not mine!)
When we were transferred to the UK two years ago, we had to get serious about the inventory. My company required me to inventory everything that we moved over here, and everything we put into storage at the company's expense. I was still using the spreadsheet.
Late last year, I decided to look for a commercial answer to the homemade spreadsheet. I wanted something that was easier to use, and to which I could attach photos.
I found my answer in a product called Everything I Own. It's pretty cheap ($20), and does everything my spreadsheet did and more. It can be customized to some extent, and does a super job of easy backup and copying onto a separate CD-ROM which can be stored somewhere else. Reports can be stored on pdf files, so it's pretty easy to use 'remotely' from the software.
It's easy to attach a photo for an item, and it doesn't require you to resize a photo. It does all that automatically. What has been really good is the ability to add comments about where an item came from (gift, heirloom, etc.) I sure don't remember who gave us what wedding present 33 years ago, but my wife does. You can also add a bequest name for something that you want to eventually pass on to someone else. We figure the commentary, along with a picture of an item, will go along way to resolving disputes if we both get hit by a bus tomorrow.
The website for the product is www.mycroftcomputing.com/eiown.html
Attached is a copy of a page from one of the reports. Multiply that one page by a few hundred entries, and it's a lot of work. But it's something we think is worth doing. We don't try to inventory everything, and the video is still important as a memory jogger in case of a catastrophic fire, but it's a step in the right direction.
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Originally Posted by Mike Williams
