SORTING
Sorting is the easy part. Remembering isn’t.
Search for a LEGO® sorting app and you get two kinds of answer: machines that tip a pile into bins, and apps that point a camera at a pile and name what’s in it. Partfolio is neither. It doesn’t sort your bricks, and it doesn’t recognise them through the lens.
What it does is the half that actually breaks. Any sorting system works on the day you finish it, because you just put everything where it is. Three months later you’re halfway through a build, you need one part, and the shelf in front of you has stopped answering. The sorting held. The remembering didn’t.
Sort as coarsely as you can get away with
The instinct, when a collection gets big, is to sort it finer: split the plates by colour, then split the colours by size, and keep going until each drawer holds one thing. It works, and it costs more every month — more containers, more decisions per part, more re-sorting every time a set comes in.
The cheaper move is to sort broadly, by part type is plenty, and write down which bin things went into. The bin then doesn’t have to explain itself, because the list explains it. That’s the fifth of the five methods in the guide below, and the one this app exists to make survivable: keeping that list current by hand is where nearly everyone gives up.
What Partfolio does with a collection you’ve already sorted
It maps the shelf, not an abstraction
Collections, boxes, drawers — three levels, because that’s how many your furniture has. Give a box a rule, one part type or one colour only, and Partfolio helps you keep it that way.
Searching a part names the box
Search by name, number, colour or category, tap Go to Box, and Partfolio names the collection, the box and the drawer. It doesn’t know where that box sits in the room. It names the box, which is the part you couldn’t do from memory.
A QR label makes the box answer back
Print QR stickers on ordinary sticker paper, put one on each box, and point your phone at a box to see what’s inside without opening it. You don’t need a label printer, and scanning a label is free on every plan, forever.
The app opens on a tab called Sort
Open Partfolio and the first tab is Sort. It isn’t a verb there, it’s a place: your collections, your boxes, your drawers, and what’s in each one. Sorting is what you did on the floor with the bins. The Sort tab is where that afternoon gets written down, so it’s still true in March.
What it doesn’t do
- It doesn’t recognise parts through the camera. That’s in development and it isn’t good enough yet. What the camera reads today is the QR code on a label, and it reads it fast.
- It doesn’t tell you where a box is in the room. It names the box — collection, box, drawer — and a picking list is grouped box by box, so you open each one once.
- It doesn’t put a price on your collection. There’s no valuation in the app.
I built this because my own sorting kept going stale.
Four bins, relabelled twice, and I still opened three of them to find one dark bluish gray plate. Partfolio is the record I couldn’t keep by hand: it maps your boxes and drawers, and searching a part tells you which one to open.
It’s coming to iPhone this winter. Leave your email and I’ll tell you the day.
No more than two emails a month, and you can leave at any point.