Collections¶

A collection is one catalogue of similar things — your books, your coins, your board games. Each collection has its own set of fields (the properties every item shares) and a list of items.

Creating a collection¶

Two ways to start:

From a template. Collectary ships with 20+ templates so you don't start blank — Books comes with Title, Author, ISBN, and so on. Pick one and edit the fields to taste.
From scratch. An empty collection where you define every field yourself.

Templates: Action Figures, Board Games, Books, Building Brick Sets, Camera Gear, Coins, Comics, Home Inventory, Houseplants, Makeup, Model Trains, Movies, Music, Recipes, Sneakers, Stamps, Tools, Trading Cards, Video Games, Watches, Whisky, Wine.

Defining fields¶

Open the collection editor to manage fields. Each field has a name, a type that controls how its value is entered and shown, and any type-specific options (the choices for a single-choice field, the symbol for a currency field). One field is the display name — the value used to label each item in lists.

Field groups¶

Group fields under names like "Identification" or "Condition" to keep large editors tidy.

When you drill into a group, or into a List field to edit its sub-fields, the path shows up in the breadcrumb at the top of the window — for example My Collections / Collection Settings / Identification. Click any earlier step to jump back; click the collection's own step to return to the top.

The breadcrumb always fits the space it has. When the path grows long, or the window gets narrow — on a phone, say — the earliest steps fold away into a small … menu that sits right after My Collections. Your starting point and the step you're currently on always stay visible; tap the … to reach anything in between. It never spills over the profile name on the right.

Every editor — collection settings, the shared field library, the item editor, and the list editors — shares the same three buttons along the bottom: ← Back, Save, and Cancel.

← Back retraces your steps one at a time and saves as it goes, exactly like your phone's back button. On a narrow screen it first closes the field settings you have open and returns you to the list you were just in; tap it again and you step up out of a drilled-in sub-list to its parent; tap it once more at the top and it leaves the editor. It never skips straight to the top — each tap goes back exactly one step, and your work is saved on the way.
Save writes everything but keeps you exactly where you are, so you can keep editing.
Cancel leaves without Back's save — at the top of a collection or item editor it drops the changes you made since your last save; inside a list it simply returns you to the item without saving.

On a narrow screen — a phone, or the desktop window pulled in tight — the editor only shows one pane at a time: the field list on its own, swapping to a single field's settings when you tap one. The buttons stay along the bottom the whole time, easy to reach with your thumb.

Layout¶

The editor also controls the item editor's layout:

Columns — spread fields across several columns so a long form fits without scrolling.
Label position — where each field's label sits: Beside (left of the input, compact), Above (stacked, cleaner with multiple columns), Adaptive (beside for one column, above for more), or Inherit to follow the app-wide default in Settings. Beside is mobile-safe: as the editor gets narrow the labels move above their inputs so they stay full-width, and slide back beside when there's room. A multi-column beside layout also drops to a single column when the window isn't wide enough to give each column room for a label and its input side by side, so inputs never get squeezed into overlap.

Reusing fields across collections¶

The Shared Field Library holds field definitions you want in more than one collection: define a field once and drop it into any collection. It supports the same field types as a collection's own editor.

Managing collections¶

From the Home screen you can create, open, reorder, and delete collections. Deleting a collection removes its items too.