GCstar is an application for managing your collections. It supports many types of collections, including movies, books, games, comics, stamps, coins, and many more. You can even create your own collection type for whatever unique thing it is that you collect! Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you’ve lent it to. You may also search and filter your collections by many criteria.

GCstar 1.6.0 is a major release of the GCstar Collection Manager. These are the release notes for version 1.6.0, containing the main new features and bug fixes. You may also read the full CHANGELOG

GCstar now includes a comprehensive statistics feature, allowing you to generate charts of all types from your collections. Want to see exactly how many romantic comedies you have compared to horror flicks? Now you can!

We’ve made a few changes to the way GCstar caches and stores images for collections, resulting in huge speed ups for launching and opening collections. This is especially noticeable when using high resolution covers for items, which in the past would cause GCstar to grind to a holt.

Confused about which of GCstar’s many website plugins to use when searching for your items? GCstar now hints you toward the best sources of information for your current language. These preferred plugins are guaranteed to be 100% functional, and return comprehensive and quality results.

We’ve changed the way GCstar displays it’s menus and options to match the current collection type. No longer will you just see the generic “Add Item” string, now you’ll see “Add Book” or “Add Movie”, etc. Much more descriptive!

Now you can quickly grab the latest information from the web about your collection items. By hitting the new “Update” button, GCstar will grab the latest data about a previously found item and fill in any blank fields you’ve got. This feature will also be expanded in future to allow you to update the information automatically for every item in your collection.

An often requested feature was the ability to choose a folder instead of a specific file for video file fields. This allows you to, for example, choose a ‘VIDEO_TS’ folder for playback (if you rip your films that way). Just right click on the ‘Select File’ button and ‘Choose a Folder’.

Our included skins were given a visual refresh and a bunch of new skins added. Your GCstar collections have never looked prettier!

We’ve added a new collection template for collectors of smart cards.

New grabbers for Amazon UK movies, DVDempire and CartelesPeliculas.

Stacks of other fantastic improvements, like:

• Dragging and dropping a file onto a collection will add that file to the current collection and fetch information for it online
• Fields with a history have an auto-completion feature when a user starts to enter text
• Right-click context menus work as expected when multiple items are selected
• Usability improvements to the unsaved collection dialog box
• The open collection dialog is no longer case sensitive when filtering filename extensions
• Book collections can now link to a local or online “digital version” of the book
• New plugin to export to an external disk. Useful to copy a collection for the GCstar Android Viewer app
• CSV Import plugin now has the option to pull information from websites during import
• Importing from Tellico handles ISBN and rank for book collections and developers for game collections
• Stacks and stacks of fixes to website plugins
• New Chinese (Traditional) translation
• Plus the usual round of bug fixes and translation updates...

GCstar 1.6.0 is available for download now! You can find a package for your operating system using the following links:

Use the GCstar stable release ppa to automatically get the latest gcstar releases and plugin updates.

(Package not yet built)

An install file for all versions of Windows is available here.

Instructions for other operating systems are available on the gcstar wiki.

Of course, since GCstar is open source, you can download the GCstar 1.6.0 source code. Full instructions for installation from source are available on the gcstar wiki.