Toy Car Collection Tracker for Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Diecast

How TrophyShelf helps a toy car collector

TrophyShelf keeps the physical side of your collection: a record of each car built from your own photographs, with its condition and its packaging, and a public shelf to point people at.

Because every record starts from your photos, it can hold any car, including one no database lists: a custom, a prototype, a car with a card error. You set Est. value yourself, so the number is yours and you can change it any time.

TrophyShelf also works well beside a release database. See how TrophyShelf compares with hobbyDB.

What a toy car records

The type is Toy Cars, found in the type picker. Every toy car has the six fields every type carries: a name, Condition, a description, Paid, Est. value and Where acquired. What decides the rest is one choice, Manufacturer / brand.

The brand list has 24 options: Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Majorette, Tomica, Kyosho, Autoart, Minichamps, Bburago, Maisto, Welly, Greenlight, M2 Machines, Johnny Lightning, Racing Champions, Corgi, Dinky, Franklin Mint, Danbury Mint, Solido, Norev, CMC, BBR, Amalgam and Other. Hot Wheels gets a form of its own, with 22 fields. The other 23 options share a general form with 30.

Pick the brand first

Switching brand later swaps the whole set of fields, and a value in a field the new form does not have is hidden. Until a brand is chosen you see the general form.

Hot Wheels: Series, Segment and the two index numbers

A mainline card prints one band, and the form has both a Series and a Segment, so the AI writes the printed band into both. Clear the one you do not use. Series index (a number like 3/5) and Mainline index (a number like 45/250) are separate fields: Series index records the car’s place in its series, and Mainline index its place in the mainline range.

Hot Wheels has no card or grading fields

The Hot Wheels form has Sealed status, but no card, blister or box condition and no grading fields. Use Condition and the description for those. The general form, for Matchbox and the rest, has them all, including Graded by with WCE (Wheel Collectors Elite), AFA, CAS and CGC.

Let the photo do the typing

Add up to 10 photos of one car and the AI reads them. In our tests on carded Hot Wheels cars it read the name, the series, the series index, the casting and the body color from the front of the card. It read the SKU and the country of origin best when the back of the card was in the photos. It also suggests a Condition, marked with an AI badge; check it against the car in your hand.

Paid, Est. value and Where acquired are yours to fill in. Designer and Art director name the people at Mattel who made the car, so add those yourself if you know them.

We have measured autofill on a few carded Hot Wheels cars only. For other brands the same photographs go through the same flow, but we have no figures. Every field the AI fills is marked, and anything it was not sure of is left blank. The free plan includes 15 AI autofills a month, refilled on the 1st; typing details in by hand is unlimited.

Check before you buy

Standing in a shop wondering whether you already own a car? Photograph it and TrophyShelf searches your own toy car collections for close matches and shows you what it found and why. It uses one of your AI autofills and up to three photos, and it leaves the decision to you. It only knows the cars you have added, so a car you never photographed will not be found.

Put your best six on a shelf, and share it

Every collection has a six-slot shelf at the top, for the cars you would point a guest at first. Tap Share and you get one link that opens in any browser, with no app and no account needed to view it. A new collection starts private, so make it public before you share the whole shelf. Each car also has a page of its own that you can share on its own: Public or Private is chosen when you add the car, Public is preselected, and a private car has no public page.

Do it in TrophyShelf

1. Create a Toy Cars collectionChoose Toy Cars in the type picker. One collection for every car, or one per brand or scale.
2. Photograph the card and the carShoot the front and the back of the card. For a loose car, shoot the car and its base. Up to 10 photos. On a Hot Wheels card the SKU and the country of origin are printed on the back.
3. Check the brand, then what the AI filledLook at Manufacturer / brand first, because it decides which form you get. Then check every field with an AI badge, the Condition it suggested included, and fix what it got wrong.
4. Add what only you knowPaid, Est. value and Where acquired are yours to fill in, so those figures are always your own.
5. Choose Public or Private, then sharePublic is preselected at step 4, so choose Private for any car you want to keep to yourself. Put your six favorites on the shelf, make the collection public and send the link.

Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Tomica and the other brand names on this page belong to their owners. TrophyShelf is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them; the names are used only to say which cars you can record.