Club MacMost Exclusive: Catalog Your Physical Media With This Bar Code Scanning Shortcut

You can use a fairly simple Shortcut on your iPhone to quickly scan the bar codes on your DVDs, CDs, books and other items to save a list of them into a Numbers spreadsheet.

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Comments: 5 Responses to “Catalog Your Physical Media With This Bar Code Scanning Shortcut”

    Stephen A York
    4 weeks ago

    Gary -
    I would love to be able to scan in my CD music collection. Could it be possible to read the bar code from the package or disc and build a list of the thousands of CDs I have with the artist and album information displayed? Steve

    4 weeks ago

    Stephen: Yes, this should work. You'll need to see what info is available and grab the artist and album name from it. Probably a lot of manual clean-up, but still easier than typing.

    Alastair
    4 days ago

    Hi Gary
    The shortcut is working well except I’m occasionally getting a conflict between which Numbers file is being used. The one on my iPhone or the other on my Mac though I suspect it only exists on iCloud. I can be scanning away and then I get a dialogue box up asking which device I should save the work on. Mac or the iPhone. I don’t understand why it suddenly decides to ask but inevitably the choice I make results in the loss of scanned data. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

    4 days ago

    Alastair: Not sure why you could be seeing that. Is the document open on the Mac at the time, maybe?

    Alastair
    3 days ago

    I’m still unsure what was going on. Yes the file was open on the Mac but that was deliberate so I could see the data being added as I scanned with the iPh. My hypothesis is that iCloud was having synch speed issues. Latterly I’ve found the SC script had been corrupted. All good now that I’ve recreated the script again. Many thanks :)

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