The first ten items of a collection go in however you like. Fifty is where a thin schema starts to cost you. You cannot sort the shelf by anything useful, you cannot answer “which ones did I buy this year”, and you scroll through the grid looking for the one you know you own.
The cause is the schema rather than the collector. A collection app can only answer questions about details you decided to record at setup, and that setup took two minutes on the day you signed up.
The test a field has to pass
A field earns its place when you have asked its question twice. Once is curiosity. Twice is a pattern, and the second time is when the missing answer starts costing you something: a scroll, a guess, a note on your phone.
The test cuts both ways. A field you add is a keystroke at entry time, on each item you add, for as long as you collect the thing. A schema with twenty fields is a form you will stop filling in halfway through item three.
The six fields
A name that tells two similar items apart
Two San Francisco quarters from 2005 look identical in a list until the mint mark is in the name. The identifier is whatever makes an item distinct in your collection: year and mint mark for coins, series and colour for Needohs, model and switch for keyboards.
In collectd this is a text field, and exactly one text field is the primary title. That value is what shows on item cards, list rows and gallery headers, so write it the way you would say it out loud, because you will be reading it in a list of fifty.
Condition, in your own wording
The useful part of a condition field is the option list. A fixed list of mint, near mint, good and poor cannot describe a squished fidget toy, so the detail goes into a note, and notes do not sort. Build the options you use as a dropdown, and condition becomes something you can filter on as well as read.
The date you acquired it
This is the one field whose value disappears if you do not write it down now. You can price a coin next month, and you can photograph it next year, but the day you bought it is gone as soon as the bag is in the drawer. Ten years of acquisition dates gives you a timeline. The same items without dates give you a pile.
What you paid
Use a currency field rather than text. Text holds “12.50”, “£12.50” and “swapped for a fidget” in one column, and a column like that sorts into nonsense. A currency field keeps the amount and the currency apart, so the numbers still add up in five years when the prices have moved.
One switch you use
A boolean field is the fastest filter in the app: two states, no typing, and a single control to set when you add an item. Retired, sold, duplicate, lent out. Pick the one or two that match a question you ask while scrolling, and skip the rest. A sold switch pays for itself only if you go looking for the sold ones.
Where it lives
“Which box is it in?” is the most common question a collection asks past fifty items, and the answer costs one word at entry time: binder page, shelf, box number, storage unit. If you have more than a handful of locations, make it a dropdown so you can filter the gallery by shelf.
The first four fields are the ones people see
Item cards show the first four fields in a collection, which makes the order part of the design rather than a detail you fix at the end. Put the identifier first and condition second and the gallery becomes scannable. Put a price first and the grid starts with a number that looks like the number beside it.
The field type decides what you can filter
Collectd builds gallery filters from dropdown, boolean and rating fields. A text field records information and stays out of the filters. If you know you will want to narrow the gallery by mint mark, grade or keycap profile later, give that detail a dropdown with the values you expect. The same detail typed into a text field is readable and inert, and as a dropdown it becomes a control you can filter with.
Adding a field late costs you the past
Adding a field to a collection with two hundred items is easy, and the two hundred items arrive with it empty, because there was no field to hold the detail. That asymmetry is the reason to think about the schema early rather than after the first sorting problem. Free plans allow ten fields in a collection and Pro allows forty, so the field cap is not the thing that stops most people. Choosing is.
Six to start
If you are building your first schema, the guides cover the mechanics: the first-collection guide walks through the empty form, and the field guide goes through the ten field types and what each one is good for. Start with six fields, and add the seventh when you catch yourself asking the same question twice.