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Maintaining a collection with Discogs: what could improve

Some people, including me, use Discogs for having an overview which releases they have. Though it is not perfect because people can, and do, change releases so it matches their own copy (even when it should have been a separate release), but it is better than nothing.

There are a few things that annoy me in the way that Discogs organizes collections. One of them is the way that releases can be organized into folders. I understand the rationale behind it: you can organize releases into folders and then look at these folders separately instead of at a big list which would work for a few items, but not when having thousands or tens of thousands of items.

Except: for me it is too restrictive. Sometimes I would like to have releases in more than one folder, for example I might want have a release in a folder "death metal", a folder "dutch", a folder "coloured vinyl" and a folder "football" at the same time (although I am not aware of any football themed Dutch death metal on coloured vinyl).

Right now organizing a collection and choosing which folders to create and in which folder to put a release into is difficult.

What I would propose is that instead of having a folder it would be possible to add tags to a release and that instead of folders I would have a tag cloud. I could then click on one or more tags in the tag cloud to see the releases that are associated with that tag.

Tags should be per user: I am not necessarily interested in how other users have tagged a release in their collection.

For me this would fix a real problem in Discogs.

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