Why You Need a System for Tracking Your Keycap Collection
I started keeping records of my keycaps three years ago because I kept losing track of which sets I owned, where they came from, and what profiles they were. It sounds silly until you've spent forty-five minutes on Reddit trying to remember if that artisan set you picked up at MechCon was from a vendor who's now defunct or whether you got it from a secondary seller at a markup. A Keycaps Logbook Yearly isn't about hoarding data for its own sake. It's about having a reference point when you need to make decisions about what to buy, what to sell, and what you're actually using versus what's collecting dust in a bin. Here's how I set mine up. Most people use spreadsheets. I use a combination of a Google Sheet for the main log and a folder of photos organized by year. The spreadsheet has columns for: date acquired, brand, set name, profile, key count, material, purchase price, vendor, and a notes field. The notes field is where the actual value lives. That's where I put things like "PBT double-shot, legends are white, not black," or "This set warms up after six months of use, character becomes lighter." The photo folder is simpler. One image per keycap set, taken in consistent lighting against a neutral background. I label them with a date-code format: 2024-03_algordanza_nexus.jpg. This matters more than you'd think. When you're scrolling through five years of acquisitions, having a visual reference alongside the spec data prevents you from conflating two similarly named sets from different manufacturers. Algordanza and Akko both make sets with "Nexus" in the name. They feel nothing alike.
Setting Up Your Keycaps Logbook Yearly
The actual setup takes about twenty minutes if you start from scratch. Open a blank Google Sheet. Create the column headers I mentioned above. Then go through your current collection and fill in what you can. You'll forget details. That's fine. Come back to it later when something triggers a memory. The beauty of a digital log is that you can update it indefinitely. For the photo organization, create a master folder called Keycaps and inside it make subfolders by year: 2023, 2024, 2025, and so on. Take the photos. Name them consistently. Move on. Don't overthink the lighting setup. A desk lamp and a white piece of cardstock as a backdrop is sufficient. You're not building a portfolio. You're building a reference. One thing most people skip: the resale value column. Add a column for current estimated market value, and update it every six months. This gives you a running tally of your collection's worth without needing to pull up Mercari or r/MechMarket constantly. It also surfaces sets that have depreciated significantly, which helps you decide whether holding onto them makes sense or whether you should move them along.
I ran into a specific problem last year that almost made me abandon the whole system. I had entered a keycap set into my log under the brand "GMK" but didn't record the exact variant. The set was a custom order from a Group Buy that ran eighteen months prior, and I'd forgotten to note the colorway name or the original vendor link. When a buyer asked me about it on Marketplace, I had no way to verify authenticity or provide the original purchase documentation. I ended up having to dig through seventeen months of email to find the order confirmation. After that, I added a mandatory field for group buy tracking numbers and order confirmation dates. It takes three extra seconds per entry and it saved me from a potentially costly misunderstanding.
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What Beginners Miss About Tracking Keycaps
The most counter-intuitive thing about maintaining a keycap log is that the act of logging changes how you buy. I noticed it happening to myself around month four. I stopped impulse-buying sets because I could literally see the gap forming in my log between what I was acquiring and what I was actually typing on. Most of my recorded sets had fewer than twenty meaningful hours of use. That's a hard number to ignore. Another thing people get wrong is focusing on the acquisition date instead of the decommission date. The date you stop using a set tells you more about your preferences than the date you bought it. I added a "last used" column to my log about a year in. It revealed that I go through phases where I prefer low-profile round keycaps for three months and then never touch them again. Knowing that pattern has saved me from buying similar sets during off-phases. There's also the material degradation tracking angle. Cherry MX-style switches and certain PBT formulations interact in ways that aren't obvious until you've used them for a long time. I logged when I switched from lubricated to dry switches on my main board and noted the change in acoustics on each keycap set. Two sets that sounded identical new ended up with noticeably different profiles after six months. The log captured that difference. Without it, I would have assumed one set was just inherently worse.
Where This System Breaks Down
Let me be clear about the limitations. A yearly logbook doesn't work well if you rotate your boards frequently across multiple desks or if you lend keyboards to friends. The "last used" column becomes unreliable when you can't track which board a set is currently on. In those cases, consider adding a location column instead: "Desk A," "Travel board," "LAN rig," etc. The system also assumes you're willing to maintain it. If you miss three months of entries, the log loses utility because you're back to guessing about acquisition dates and sources. I've had slumps where I stopped logging for two to three months at a time. When I come back, it takes me a full weekend to catch up, and even then I'm filling gaps from memory, which is unreliable. The workaround is setting a recurring calendar reminder for the first Sunday of each month to review and update. There's also a storage ceiling. After about fifty keycap sets in your log, the spreadsheet becomes unwieldy. Filtering and sorting help, but you'll find yourself creating separate sheets for different categories: group buys, retail purchases, artisan vendors, spare keycap bins. That's when the system starts fraying. At that point, migrating to a dedicated database or a tool like Notion or Airtable makes more sense than continuing to force everything into a single Google Sheet.
The photo approach has its own bottleneck. Image quality matters less than you'd think, but quantity matters more. By year three, I had over two hundred photos to manage. Folder organization handles the bulk of it, but searching for a specific set by visual characteristics is slow. I added a simple tagging system using the file name extensions: _low, _high, _artisan, _special. It cuts search time from minutes to seconds. Ultimately, a Keycaps Logbook Yearly is a practical tool, not a hobby enhancement. It won't make your keystrokes better or your setup look cooler. But it will tell you exactly how much money you've spent on keycaps in a given year, which sets are worth reselling, and why you keep buying the same type of keycap over and over again. That last point alone is worth the twenty minutes it takes to set up the spreadsheet.
