Good Application Dragged Down by Bad Database Priorities

I have been using MyMovies on iPhone and Mac OS X for nearly three years. I have some problems with the system, but first, I recommend the program for several reasons:

Your data is stored and viewable on the web. This service is completely free if you load it all at once, but you need one of their apps to change it. If you have all your titles catalogued by UPC code, you can try loading the list at their website to get a good feel of how well the program will work for you.

Phone app is cheap and you can earn points by submitting data to get the “Pro” Mac app for free too (basically, it becomes more capable as you add data to their database). I use the free Mac app for editing and adding scans of disc covers, but the (paid) phone app more for looking things up or adding new titles by barcode.

Because your collection is stored online, you can view it from any of their apps or the web at any time you’re online from anywhere. The apps also keep local copies cached so they work offline too (but could get out of sync).

But there are some downsides to the Mac version and the system in general:

The Mac OS app is not updated in step with the other versions. This is starting to get painful as some titles added from my phone cannot be edited from the Mac because “Another user contributed to this title with a newer version of My Movies. To contribute to this title you must upgrade My Movies.” But there is no upgrade, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for one. (This prevents me from submitting hi-res cover scans of these titles, for instance.)

Cover scan submission is iffy. The app will sometimes crash or behave in bizarre ways after importing a scan. It sometimes takes a couple of tries to submit them but it works.

The policies for database additions are woefully misguided, As long as what you need is in the database, things are fine, but most boxed sets are not in there as such so many, many movie titles will not show up in your collection. Adding a boxed set is far too difficult, It should be super easy to say that a barcode is associated with multiple titles and fix other problems later, but it’s not, so people just do not submit boxed sets and the data, the apps, and the users suffer for it.

Having anything- even the wrong movie- associated with a barcode is better than nothing because at least the item will get added to your collection when you scan it. If there’s nothing for the code, you have to manually enter it or remember to try to rescan later. Again, the amount of data required to submit a new title can be a deterrent for some people so the database grows slower than it should.

Since I started using this program, I have submitted every new single-movie title that didn’t scan on the phone from the Mac version and had great success (I have over 2000 points). I have tried to add or correct many boxsets and have had more than half (and all the larger ones) rejected or cause the Mac app to crash during the submission process. I’ve tried hard to do my part and submit things, but the software and database moderators make it too difficult. I have literally hundreds of movies that don’t show up in My Movies because the boxes are just stubs. That’s a serious enough problem that I cannot completely endorse any version of their app because they all use the same database. Even so, the free or phone versions are worth the price for people needing to catalog video collections- and these database issues may clear up in time.

Update: newest version no longer works on OS X 10.6.8. Not at all. Not ever. Company has been completely unresponsive to fixing it.

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