Tom's Card Manager

Getting started

Tom's Card Manager is a single program that runs entirely on your own PC. There is nothing to install, no account to create, and nothing to sign up for. Unzip the download to any folder you like — your Documents folder, the Desktop, or a USB stick — and double-click TomCardManager.exe to run it.

1. Unzip the download. Right-click TomsCardManager.zip, choose Extract All, and pick a folder. Keep all the files together in that folder.
2. Run the program. Open the folder and double-click TomCardManager.exe. The main window opens showing the full Pokémon card catalogue — over 20,000 cards across 170+ sets, already loaded.
3. Set up your store details (optional). If you plan to publish a store page, open Store › Store Page Settings… first and fill in your store name and contact line. You can skip this if you only want to track your collection.

The main window

The window has three main parts:

• The card grid fills most of the window — one row per card, showing its set, number, name, rarity, and how many you hold.
• The toolbar across the top lets you filter the grid by Set, Search text, Rarity, Location, and sale Channel, with a Clear filters button to reset them.
• The detail panel on the right is where you record what you own for the selected card — variant, condition, quantity, price, and location. It also shows the card's picture.

Along the bottom, the status bar tells you how many cards are showing and, when some are hidden, which filter is hiding them (see Finding cards).

Everything is driven from the menu bar:

The catalogue

The catalogue is the master list of Pokémon TCG cards — names, set names, card numbers, rarities and picture links. It comes pre-loaded with the full English catalogue — over 20,000 cards across 170+ sets — so you normally do nothing here. Everything to do with it lives under the Catalogue menu.

Update online — getting newly released cards

Catalogue › Update online… downloads any cards that are not in your catalogue yet and adds them. Run it when a new set is released.

Update only ever adds. It never changes or removes your stock, prices, locations, sale history, or the cards you added yourself. It also never changes the details of a card you already have — that is what Recheck is for, below.

Recheck — refreshing details you already have

Card data is occasionally corrected upstream: a misspelled name, a wrong rarity, a picture link that changed. Update cannot pick those up, because Update only adds. Recheck is what does.

• Catalogue › Recheck a set… — pick one set from a list and re-read it.
• Catalogue › Recheck everything… — re-read every downloaded set. This downloads one file per set, so it can take several minutes. You can cancel part-way; sets already finished are kept.

A recheck refreshes reference details only — names, rarities, numbers and picture links.

Adding your own cards

The downloaded catalogue does not have everything. Regional promos, error cards, misprints, sealed oddities, cards from a language the data source does not cover — if you hold it and the catalogue does not list it, you can create it yourself.

Adding a card

1. Choose Catalogue › Add a card…
2. Type the card name. This is the only required field. Everything else can be left blank and filled in later.
3. Pick a set, or don't. The Set dropdown lists every downloaded set. If the card does not belong to one, choose Not in a listed set and type your own set name (and optionally a series) instead.
4. Fill in what you know. Number, printed total (leave blank for a promo), rarity, card type and language are all optional. Choosing a set fills the printed total in for you, unless you have typed your own — yours is never overwritten.
5. Add a picture (optional). Click Choose picture… — see below.
6. Click Add card. The card appears in the grid like any other.

Adding more than a handful this way gets old quickly. If you have a card list in a file — a whole set, say — use Importing a card list instead.

A card you add is an ordinary catalogue row. Stock, conditions, prices, locations, Want/Trade flags, exports, reports and the store page all work on it exactly as they do on a downloaded card. There is nothing second-class about it.

Pictures

Cards you add can carry their own picture — a scan or a phone photo of the card in your hand. Click Choose picture in the card form and pick a JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF or TIFF file.

The app then tidies it up for you:

• It turns the picture the right way up if your camera recorded that it was taken sideways.
• It scales it down to fit within 600 × 840 pixels — plenty for a card — and re-saves it as a JPEG. This keeps your database file from ballooning: a 3 MB phone photo becomes a small fraction of that.
• Re-saving also drops the hidden extra data a camera or phone attaches to a photo, including the location where it was taken. That information never reaches a file you might later back up, copy to a USB stick, or hand to someone else.

Pictures are stored inside card_manager.db, not as loose files. There is still exactly one file to back up. They also appear on your generated store page whether or not Store › Self-host images is switched on — a picture that lives on your own machine has no online source to opt out of.

Editing and deleting

Catalogue › Edit this card… and Catalogue › Delete this card… work on the selected card. Both are also on the grid's right-click menu. They are greyed out for downloaded cards — a downloaded card would just come back with the next update, so removing it would achieve nothing.

Editing keeps the card's identity. Correct a name or swap the picture and everything attached to that card — stock, prices, locations, sale history — stays attached.

Check my added cards

Over time, a card you created by hand may turn up in the downloaded catalogue. Catalogue › Check my added cards… looks for that: it compares your cards against downloaded ones by name and number, ignoring capitals, punctuation and leading zeros, and lists any matches it finds.

Importing a card list

Adding cards one at a time is fine for a promo or two. When a new set lands and the catalogue does not have it yet, it is not. Catalogue › Import cards from a file… reads a card list and adds only the cards you do not already have.

It reads:

• .csv — comma or tab separated, with a heading row.
• .txt — tab separated, including Excel's "Unicode Text" export.
• .json — a list of cards, in either of the two common shapes.

The only thing a file really needs is a column of card names. Set, number, printed total, rarity, card type, language and a picture address are all used when they are there. Headings do not have to match exactly — name, card name and product name all work, and so do set / set name, number / card number, and so on. A column it does not recognise is listed as ignored rather than guessed at.

How it goes

1. Choose Catalogue › Import cards from a file… and pick your file.
2. Read the screen. Every card in the file is listed with what would happen to it. Nothing has been written yet, and you can untick any row you do not want.
3. Click Import. A backup is taken first, automatically, before a single row is written.

Then run the same file again. The second time it will say 0 to add, with every card listed as already in your catalogue — which is the whole point of the screen, and the quickest way to satisfy yourself about what it is actually doing before you trust it with a big list.

What the screen tells you

Each row says one of:

A card counts as one you already have only when its set, number and name all agree. All three, because a card reprinted into a later set keeps its original number — matching on name and number alone would throw away every reprint as a duplicate.

When the file does not say what set the cards are from

Plenty of card lists leave the set out, because whoever made it knew which set it was. The box above the list, Set for cards that don't name one, fills it in. Change it and the whole list re-checks itself immediately, so you can watch cards move between "will be added" and "already in your catalogue" as you get it right.

If you do not know the set, press Scan for set. It compares the cards in the file against every set in your catalogue and shows you what they look like, most likely first, with the share of the file each one accounts for. Pick one and it fills the box in. It never changes anything by itself.

Pictures

If the file lists picture addresses, a tickbox offers to keep them and names the sites they point at. Leave it on and those cards show pictures like any other; turn it off and they are added with none. Nothing is downloaded during the import either way — a picture is only ever fetched later, when you select that card, exactly as it is for every other card.

What it will never do

Imported cards afterwards

Cards added this way are marked as added by hand, the same as ones you create with Add a card. That is what lets you edit or delete them later — something you cannot do to a downloaded card.

Marking your stock

This is the core of the app: telling it which cards you have. Click any card in the grid, then use the detail panel on the right.

1. Select the card in the grid (use the filters or search to find it — see below).
2. Pick the variant from the dropdown: Standard, Holo, Reverse Holo, or Other.
3. Enter quantity and price for each condition you hold — there are three rows: Mint, Near Mint, and Played. Leave a row at zero if you do not have that condition.
4. Set a location (optional) in the Location box — e.g. "Binder 1" or "Box A". The dropdown remembers locations you have already used, so you can reuse them with one click, or type a new one.
5. Click Save. The card's held count updates in the grid.

Each variant keeps its own quantities, prices, and location, so a Holo and a Reverse Holo of the same card are tracked separately. Cards you added yourself work exactly the same way.

Finding cards

With 20,000+ cards, the filters are how you get to the one you want. They all combine, so you can narrow down quickly:

Click a column heading to sort by it. Use View › Check all to tick every visible card at once — useful before a bulk export or sale.

Exporting the list

File › Export card list saves what you have ticked in the grid:

• Save as CSV… — a spreadsheet file.
• Save as TXT… — a plain readable list, good for pasting into an email or a forum post.
• Copy to clipboard (spreadsheet) — the same data on the clipboard, ready to paste straight into Excel or Google Sheets.

Tick nothing and it exports everything you hold. The export follows the mode you are in: prices are included in Sales mode and left out in Collection mode, so the file always matches what is on screen.

Checking eBay prices

The detail panel has an eBay button that opens an eBay search for the selected card in your browser, so you can gauge what it is selling for. Two checkboxes shape the search:

• Current listings (not sold) — search live listings rather than completed ones.
• Holo — add "Holo" to the search terms.

Which eBay site it uses (ebay.com.au, ebay.com, ebay.co.uk, and others) is set under Store › Store Page Settings…. The default is ebay.com.au.

The store page

Tom's Card Manager can build a self-contained web page of your in-stock cards that you upload to your own website — a simple, searchable online store or want-list with no server or database needed.

1. Set your store details

Open Store › Store Page Settings… and fill in:

All of these default to neutral, blank values — the page shows your details, never anyone else's.

2. Generate the page

1. Optionally turn on Store › Self-host images if you want the page to include downloaded copies of the card images (rather than linking to them online).
2. Choose Store › Generate Store Page… and pick an output folder.
3. Check the folder if it asks. The first time you publish to a folder that already holds an index.html, cards.json or images folder, the app names those files and asks before replacing them. See the warning below.
4. Upload the result. The app creates index.html and cards.json (plus an images folder if you chose self-host). Upload all of them together to your web host.

Cards you added yourself appear on the page like any other, and any picture you gave them is published with them — self-host or not.

A card with no picture at all gets a tidy "No image available" box rather than a broken-image icon.

Recording sales

Every sale is recorded so you keep a history and your stock stays accurate.

• Sales › Update Checked Cards Sold… — tick cards in the grid first, then use this to record a batch of sales at once.
• Quick Sell (detail panel) — records one copy sold at the shown price.
• Sales › Undo Last Sale — reverse the most recent sale. It shows you the sale first — card, variant, condition, quantity, price, channel and date — and asks before doing anything.
• Sales › Undo Bulk Recent Sales… — review recent sales and reverse a whole batch or selected ones.
• Sales › Sales Report (HTML)… — produce a self-contained report with totals, a dashboard, and period presets, opened in your browser.

Right-clicking a card in the grid also offers Update Checked Cards Sold and Recent sales for this card.

Collection & trading

Switch to View › Mode › Collection to track your personal collection separately from your sale stock. Collection entries work the same way (variant, condition, quantity, location) but have no prices — it is what you own, not what you are selling.

• Want / Trade flags — mark a card as one you want or one you are willing to trade, using the panel checkboxes.
• → Sale — move a copy from your collection into your sale stock in one click when you decide to sell it.
• Show filter — narrow the collection view to All, Owned, Want, or Trade.

The Collection menu produces three HTML reports, each opened in your browser:

Backups, compacting & your data

Everything you enter lives in one file, card_manager.db, next to the program — stock, collection, sales, locations, the cards you added and their pictures. That single file is the thing to protect.

• File › Back up database now — saves a timestamped copy into the backups folder. Do this regularly, and before anything major.
• File › Restore from backup… — replaces your current data with a chosen backup. The app checks the file is a valid backup first and takes an automatic safety copy before swapping, so a bad restore can be undone.
• File › Export inventory to CSV… — save every stock row as a spreadsheet file for your own records. Unlike the card-list export, this one is a complete dump of your stock, not just what is on screen.

Compacting the database

When you delete rows, the database file does not shrink. The space inside it is marked reusable and the app writes new data into it before growing the file again — which is efficient, but it does mean a file that has had a lot of churn can sit larger on disk than the data in it warrants.

File › Compact database… hands that space back. It shows you three numbers before doing anything:

• Size on disk — how big the file actually is.
• Actually in use — how much of that is your data.
• Reusable space — the difference, which is what compacting would return to your drive.

Say yes and it takes a backup, rebuilds the file, and reports the size before and after. Nothing is deleted — every card, sale, location and picture is kept exactly as it was.

Files & folders

Everything the app uses sits in its own folder, next to the EXE. Nothing is written anywhere else on your PC except the output folder you choose yourself when generating a store page or saving a report.

In the app's folder

In the folder you generate into

Troubleshooting

The app won't open

Make sure you extracted the ZIP fully (do not run it from inside the ZIP viewer) and that TomCardManager.exe and its files are together in one folder. If Windows SmartScreen blocked it, see the note under Getting started.

A card I added has disappeared

Almost always a filter. Check the status bar — it names what is hiding cards. The usual culprit is View › In stock only, which hides any card you have not recorded stock against yet, including one you have only just created. Click Clear filters and untick In stock only, then search for the card by name.

The panel says "No cards yet"

That means the catalogue is empty — there are no cards at all, not that a filter is hiding them. The download ships with the full catalogue already loaded, so the usual cause is that card_manager.db has been deleted, renamed, or left behind when the app was copied to another folder. Either put the file back next to TomCardManager.exe, restore a backup, or do what the panel suggests and run Catalogue › Update online… to download the catalogue fresh.

It is asking me about replacing files in my own website folder

That prompt appears the first time you publish into a folder that already contains an index.html, cards.json or images folder. It is asking once, on purpose: those are the names the app writes, so publishing there replaces them. Read the path it shows. If it is your store folder, choose Yes and you will not be asked for it again. If the path is not what you expected — your Desktop, your Documents, somebody else's site — choose No; nothing is written and the folder is not remembered.

If a folder you publish to every week suddenly asks, you have almost certainly picked a different folder in the browse box.

"Your store page settings could not be read"

Something is stopping the app opening settings.ini — most often another program has it open, or the folder is read-only (running the app from inside a ZIP, or from a locked-down location, will do it). The app tells you the reason rather than quietly falling back to a blank shop, because publishing a store page with someone else's default details is worse than not publishing one. Close whatever has the file open, or move the app folder somewhere you have write access, and try again.

My database file keeps getting bigger

That is normal, and mostly it is the pictures — they live inside the database by design, so there is only ever one file to back up. If you have deleted a lot of cards or pictures and want the space back on disk, use File › Compact database… (see above).

An update, recheck or generate seems stuck

All of them show a progress box with a Cancel button. Cancelling is safe — an update keeps the cards already added, a cancelled recheck keeps the sets already done, and a cancelled Generate leaves your existing store page untouched. A recheck of every set downloads one file per set, so several minutes is normal.

Sending a diagnostic log

If you report a problem, make sure Help › Write debug log is ticked, reproduce the issue, then send the debug.log file from the app's folder. It records what the app did — counts, set names and the folders it used. There are no prices and no sale figures in it, but the folder paths do include your Windows user name, so have a look before you send it.

Still stuck?

Support for this free tool is best-effort, from one developer. Get in touch via the feedback link below — bug reports and feature requests are welcome too.