Tapewrm
“My local video store hates to see me and my TAPEWRM coming!”— Local reseller
“No more accidentally buying tapes I already own! TAPEWRM cataloged my collection in less than 12 parsecs*”— Physical media enthusiast
About
The Tapewrm project is an initiative born out of a passion for VHS collecting and a desire to make cataloging easier. The tool uses the power of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) trained against hundreds of photos of VHS shelves to identify and extract the titles of tapes from photos of your collection.
Simply snap a photo of your VHS shelf and let Tapewrm do the rest as it extracts individual spines, reads the titles and consults with AI to cleanup any OCR errors, with the option to organize everything into a neat digital catalog that you can copy, paste, sort, and share as you please.Try it out!
HOW TO
The current iteration of the Tapewrm app is trained on shelves of roughly 100 tapes aligned in single rows of vertical standing spines. So if this looks like your collection, you're in luck! Just snap a photo of it and feed it to Tapewrm.
If Tapewrm gets stumped on a tape, the app will present you with the extracted spine and ask you to fill out the title manually with the help of live autocomplete results by TMDB (The Movie Database).
Want to catalog your tapes but your shelves are more of a chaotic mess of horizontal stacks, leaning towers, and general VHS mayhem? Try it out anyways! Your photo will help train version 2.0, which you can be notified of updates of by following Tom on Instagram.
“For best results, straighten your stacks!”— Fellow Enthusiast
“I stack my tapes wide, so before I uploaded them to TAPEWRM, I just rotated them in my Gallery ”— Clever Person