Coolector – free movie software comes with a massive library and unfortunate interface

Coolector is a free movie encyclopaedia program that ships with a database of 41,000 movies and 86,000 people. Think of it as a downloadable mini imdb.com and you’ll be somewhere close. Except that the interface and search on this product is severely crippled. At first glance having all that movie data at your fingertips creates a sort of head rush of excitement.

But then you find that actually searching for something is a little more arcane than it should be. For some weird reason, things like your movie ratings and whether you own it already are more important search criteria than categories, date of production and stuff like that. Or it seems that way. In fact the best thing about the interface is the integration with PicLens which makes the image handling really nice for things like DVD covers.

Hey it’s unfair to pick on freeware OK, so I’ll stop now, but the shame is this could be a really nice product if they threw away the broken interface and went for something clearer, faster and more useful. As it is, I can’t give it more than a tepid verdict I’m afraid, even though it could be a great way of tracking movie wishlists and your library. Shame.

Coollector was designed to be at the same time powerful and easy to use. Even the non-geeky users will immediately harness the power of the program. Coollector is both an encyclopedia of movies and a database of existing videos. You track not only the videos you own, but also all the movies you’ve seen, good or bad. Contrary to other movie collection managers, you don’t start with some dull empty database. The whole encyclopedia is included with the program… you download… you have it all ! You can rate the movies and persons. You easily maintain a wish list. You keep track of the videos you own, as well as those you’ve loaned. There’s price information, and tools to help you find the best bargains.

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