Using DEVONthink as a movie database

@dsh1705

In the latest version v2.4.1 I can’t find any “Personal Review and Rating” feature. The only menu command name that comes close to it is “Review Inspector”.

Rating is done in the same way as in DT, by clicking on stars.

@NickLowe

“I just tried using @dsh1705’s trick of storing comments in the Review field”

Where is this Review field??

“database customizability is limited; you can’t add user-defined fields, and it doesn’t have a field for country of origin or language.”

I downloaded the free version and scanned one folder. In the left pane you should be able to see “Countries”; this looks pretty much like groups in DT. Each country shows the corresponding flag and the number of movies from each country. In my test USA turns up with 2 movies, which is definitely wrong, there are much more US movies in the sample. Possibly many of my movies do not have a country as a metadata, but I would expect the program to look up this information for me in some online movie database, or at least allow me to enter the information manually; but as you indicated, there seems to be no field for countries where one can manually enter the missing information.

Yes, I don’t know where the Countries data in the sidebar is coming from – presumably from an external database – but it seems not to be editable. If you pull up the Info screen with Get Info, you do get a non-editable section at the bottom called Production Countries, which seems to be the only way you can identify international co-productions between different countries. (Who knew that Castle Freak was an US-Albania coproduction? Not me…) That also seems to be the only place to view Production Companies (a useful field to have, but it’s not editable, clickable, or searchable).

The Review field may only appear in the Pro version; it’s in the third tab of the Inspector on the right, and you need to click the Write Review button at the bottom to edit it. (After text has been entered, this changes to Edit Review.)
Screenshot 2022-10-20 at 21.07.30