All My Movies Tips and Tricks

Below is a list of some tips and tricks you may need using All My Movies. We have formed them as questions and answers. Everything here is written for the current version; the full documentation lives in the online manual, and every key combination the program understands is listed on the keyboard shortcuts page.

Q: How do I make a group of movies stand out in the list?

A: Imagine that you want to quickly locate a group of movies. Say, movies you would not give to anyone because they are valuable to you. You can mark them in the movie list with any color you want. Just create a personal mark (a user-defined flag) in the Preferences dialog (CTRL-P), "Custom fields" tab, "Personal marks (tags)" group — the color is set there as well. After the mark is created, you can set or reset it on the "Custom fields" tab of the movie card, and "Quick filter - Personal marks" will then show you those movies only.

Q: Can I set a mark, a media location or a genre on many movies at once?

A: Yes. Select several movies in the list with CTRL or SHIFT, then open the movie card as usual. The card opens in group mode and whatever you fill in is written to every selected movie, while the fields you leave empty are not touched. Personal marks have three states here: grey means "leave alone", ticked means "set", unticked means "remove". To wipe a field in all of the selected movies, type <DEL> into it. Before anything is written, the program shows you what it is about to change and in how many movies.

Q: I found a better cover on a web site. Do I have to save it to a file first?

A: No. In the browser, right-click the picture and choose "Copy image". Then right-click the movie in the All My Movies list and choose "Paste image as Cover". "Paste image as Screenshot" in the same menu adds the picture to the screenshots instead. Anything you can copy works: a frame from a video player, a phone photo of the box, a picture from an image editor. See also how to download cover art.

Q: Can I change the look of the movie details pane?

A: Yes, it is an HTML template, and 20 of them come with the program: menu "View - HTML template". Dark ones (Standard Dark, Dark, Indian Dark, Premiere) go well with the dark theme. All the templates with screenshots, plus a guide to writing your own (which fields you can place, what the built-in HTML renderer understands, why an empty field removes a whole line), are in our open bolide-card-templates repository on GitHub. A new template is a folder copied into "moviecards" next to the program.

Q: How do I duplicate a movie card?

A: In some cases, you may need to make a movie card with a slightly different title or other details. You can save your time by not having to enter all the details manually. Pressing the CTRL-D shortcut key in the movie list will create a duplicate of the current movie selected. Note that this trick does not work in the tree view mode when you use the "Group movies by" feature.

Q: I have two person records with slightly different names, but they are really the same person! How can I fix this?

A: You can merge person, friend, media location, and country records. Open the corresponding directory from the "Directories" menu, select two or more items you want to merge, right click and select the "Merge selected..." menu item. Then you'll be asked for the record you would like to keep in the database. Select the record and click the "OK" button. That's all!

Q: And the opposite — two different actors share the same name and ended up as one record?

A: That happens with common names, and it makes a filmography look very strange. Open "Directories - Names", right click the person and choose "Split person..." — you can then say which movies belong to which of the two. If you are not sure where to look, the "View - Suspicious (possible namesakes)" filter in the same window collects the records that look like two people at once. While you are there, "View - Orphans" shows the people who are no longer used in any movie and can safely go.

Q: How can I reverse sort mode or filter condition?

A: In most cases, you can reverse the sort mode and filter condition by holding the Shift key while you select the sort mode. For example, if you want to show seen movies only, you should hold the Shift key and select the "Quick filter-Show unseen" menu item. Another example, you may want to display recently added movies at the end of the movie list. To do this, you should hold the Shift key, right click over the movie list and select the "Group movies by - Date added" menu item.

Q: How do I print my movie collection?

A: All My Movies has a built-in print manager with a preview and editable templates, including jewel case inserts and cover sheets. Press F7 (or use "Tools - Print collection...") to print your movie collection, filtering or marking the movies you want beforehand. CTRL-ALT-P prints just the movie card you are looking at, and CTRL-F saves exactly the same thing as a PDF file. You no longer need a web browser, and export to Excel and CSV no longer needs Microsoft Office to be installed on the computer.

Q: I already have my collection in another program. Do I have to retype it?

A: No. Use "Database - Import collection from..." and pick the program: Ant Movie Catalog, DVD Profiler, Movie Collector, Movienizer / Medianizer, CATVids, MBase2, EMDB, My Movies or Personal Video Database. The media centers Kodi, Plex and Emby / Jellyfin are on the same menu — their libraries come across with covers, series and episodes. If one of these programs is installed on the computer, All My Movies notices it at startup and offers to import the collection for you. A spreadsheet or a text file goes through "Tools - Import from..." instead; a list of nothing but titles is enough, because batch update will then fetch the rest.

Q: I do not have a barcode scanner. Can I still add discs by barcode?

A: Press F6 and tick "Use webcam" — hold the back of the box up to the camera and the program reads the UPC/EAN barcode itself. If the barcode is not known yet, All My Movies asks our online barcode catalog about it, so the next collector who scans that box gets the answer straight away. A dedicated USB scanner works just as well: it simply types the digits for you.

Q: Which disc is this? I have the box in my hand.

A: Press F9 ("Barcode search") and scan the barcode — the movie is located in your collection, however large it is. Then F12 marks it lent or returned in the Loan Manager.

Q: My collection has grown. What in it needs my attention?

A: Three keystrokes give you three cleanup lists: CTRL-F9 shows the movies with no cover, CTRL-F10 the movies with an empty URL field (in other words, the ones never looked up in an online movie database), and CTRL-F11 the movies with no video file attached. "Quick filter - Show duplicate titles" catches the film you bought twice and the import that ran twice.

Q: Can I get a dark interface?

A: Yes. Preferences (CTRL-P), "Display Area" tab, "Dark theme" — the lists, the movie card and the virtual shelf all switch together. The program is also fully high-DPI aware, so it stays sharp on a 4K display and on two monitors with different scaling.

Q: Can one movie card point at another one?

A: It can. Right click a movie and choose "Copy internal movie link", then paste the link into the "Description" or "Comments" field of another movie — handy for sequels, remakes and box sets. Clicking the link jumps to that movie, and ALT-Left brings you back.

Q: I want to play a file in a different player, not the default one.

A: Right click the movie and use the "Open with" submenu — it offers the same programs Windows Explorer would, so you can send one file to VLC and the next one to your usual player without changing any settings.

Q: What shall we watch tonight?

A: Press F8 and the program suggests something from your collection that you have not seen yet. Hold Shift while pressing F8 and it will consider the movies you have already seen as well — which is usually how an old favorite gets its second evening.

Some hidden keyboard shortcuts you may find useful:

• CTRL-D duplicates movie record as described in one of the Q&A above.
• CTRL-F9, CTRL-F10 and CTRL-F11 show the movies with no cover, with an empty URL field and with an empty Local Path field.
• ESC cancels any applied filter or closes any popup dialog box.
• SHIFT-CTRL-P plays the movie if this is possible. Local path should contain a valid path to a video file and the file must exist there.
• ALT-Left and ALT-Right walk back and forward through the movies you have been looking at, like the arrows in a web browser. Inside the movie card the same keys move to the previous and the next movie without closing it.
• SHIFT-CTRL-F puts the cursor straight into the fast locate box above the movie list.
• CTRL-Z switches movie view layout. Two layouts are available - vertical (movie list is on the left and the movie details are on the right of the main program window) and horizontal (movie list is on the top and the movie details are on the bottom of the main program window).
• CTRL-ALT-Z hides the movie details panel altogether and gives the list the whole window.
• CTRL-Num + and CTRL-Num - scale the movie card up and down, CTRL-Num * returns it to the original size. Together with the "Large Print" card template this is the answer to a card that is too small to read comfortably.
• CTRL-ALT-C saves the movie cover with the default file name of [MovieID].jpg, where [MovieID] is the internal unique ID for the movie.
• CTRL-ALT-S adds screenshots from a file, which name is given in the "Local Path" field.
• CTRL-ALT-R reopens the current database. In network mode this is how you see the movies other people have just added.
• SHIFT-CTRL-F8 rebuilds the database indexes — worth trying if the list ever starts behaving oddly.

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