I was keeping a spreadsheet to answer one question: what did I actually finish this year? It had columns for films, books and games, nothing for the audiobooks I never recorded or the show I quietly gave up on in season four — and I forgot to update it more often than not. Come December it could tell me only the fraction I had remembered to type in.

So Shelf is one library for all of it, on your own machine. No account, no server: everything sits in a single SQLite file you can copy, back up, and still read in ten years. It fetches covers and episode lists when you want them, and works perfectly well with the network unplugged — every field is editable by hand, and half-remembered entries are welcome. The metadata is scaffolding anyway. What makes a library worth keeping is what you write in it afterwards.

SCREENSHOTS