6

I am looking for a free software solution to be able to manage and track my personal/private wine collection. There are some wine cellar management software solutions out there (eg: “winebanq“ etc.), but none of those wine cellar management software solutions seem to be free.

What the software should offer:

  • Cellar/Storage Management
  • import and display individual images of wine labels
  • Edit and store “tasting” notes
  • Reports/Charts (eg: number of bottles by wine category, etc.)
  • Digital cellar visualization

The operating system may be either Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) or Microsoft Windows. I have both available.

Which free “wine cellar management software” would you recommend to keep track of my wine collection?

In case of doubt: Please note that I am looking for an offline solution; not a web-based solution that requires an internet connection.

1
  • Did you ever come right? I am looking for something similar and will probably end up doing my own! Apr 19, 2017 at 16:53

2 Answers 2

5

The problem lies squarely in this thread about wince cellar software; there is no one optimal piece of software out there. Each person seems to be looking for specific information, and no app out there is going to give you that.

The best thing to do would be to design the software yourself. Or, draw up a list of specs and mock forms (using even MSPaint, at least it gives some visualization) and either ask a computer-literate friend or give it a shot yourself in something like Access (which is fairly easy to learn). If you get stumped, there's always StackOverflow (a sister website to this very site) where people can help you with your code.

1

I didn't find the accepted answer particularly satisfying since it seems to gloss over the amount of work necessary to program, and MS Access is not free. Not everyone has a programmer friend willing to code an entire application for free.

When I read the question my first thought was "this would be easy in Filemaker". Of course Filemaker is also commercial software. I did some searching and Kexi seems to be the closest open source equivalent to MS Access or Filemaker. I haven't worked with it, but it seems reasonably mature and featured. It offers visual form design and avoids programming. Here is another link. Kexi is cross platform.


Additional information provided by OuzoPower:

I have some experience of Kexi. I agree that Kexi is currently the closest equivalent to Filemaker or MS Access.

Kexi is not designed especially for wine cellar management, but you can easily edit templates to edit a database. Images are stored as BLOB and can be easily displayed in Kexi.

Kexi is using a sqlite database and can work fully offline, even without installing a MySQL or PostgreSQL server. Kexi also allows importing records from MySQL or PostgreSQL if required. Additionally, you can use other softwares to edit the sqlite databases, like SQLitestudio for instance. Kexi allows generating reports as well.

As Johnny Bones said, the best thing will probably be building the software yourself.

A "web based" solution does not require an Internet connection if you can download its source code, as you can run a local server (on your own desktop/laptop). If you can find a good wine cellar solution working with PHP/MySQL, you could use xampp for instance to preinstall Apache/PHP/MySQL

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.