Getting Your Vintage Keycaps Under Control Without Losing Your Mind
I've been collecting vintage keyboard keycaps since the late 2000s. At some point I had over 400 individual caps spread across a dozen project boxes in my garage, and I had no idea what half of them were, where they came from, or which legends matched which profiles. That changed when I started using a proper tracking system. The one I've stuck with for years is Keycaps Tracker Vintage, and it's not perfect but it does the job without requiring a computer science degree to set up. The basic concept is simple. You create an account, add your caps one by one or in batches, and assign them attributes like profile, material, legend style, and origin. From there you can search, filter, and generate reports. The interface looks like it was designed in 2014 and hasn't had a major refresh since. That's actually a feature for some people. It's predictable. It doesn't rearrange its menus every time the developer decides something should be "more intuitive."
How Keycaps Tracker Vintage Actually Works in Practice
When I first loaded my collection, I spent about three hours entering roughly 180 caps manually. Each entry takes maybe two minutes once you know the workflow: click add, fill in profile type (Cherry, OEM, SA, MT4, etc.), note the material as either ABS or PBT, throw in a quick legend description, and tag it with whatever source it came from. There's a barcode-ish system where you can assign a personal inventory code to each cap, which helps a lot if you move everything into plastic ziplocks and start labeling them. One thing beginners miss is that the batch import feature actually works decently if you have a CSV file already. I had an old spreadsheet from when I was buying keycaps on eBay and just pasted that into the importer. Saved me probably two hours. The column headers don't need to match exactly. The system auto-mapped most of them after I played with it for ten minutes. Here's where I hit a real snag that took me weeks to figure out. If you have mixed-set caps from the same keyboard where some legends are worn almost completely flat and others are still crisp, the system doesn't have a good field for condition grading. It has a notes section but it's unstructured text. My workaround was to create a second custom field in my head using abbreviations in the notes. Something like "leg-7/10 wear-3" meant legend wear at 7 out of 10 and general wear at 3. That's rough but it kept everything searchable when I needed to pull up caps in decent condition versus ones that needed restoration work. I ended up writing a quick script that parsed the notes field and exported a separate condition column to Excel because that's just how much I care about this apparently.
The search and filter function is probably the strongest part. You can narrow down by profile family, material, color, region, and year range. The year range is especially useful because some sets have known production windows. DCS1A keycaps from the early '90s, for instance, show up reliably if you filter by Japan origin and pre-2000 production dates. That kind of specificity is what makes this worth setting up rather than just keeping a text file on your desktop.
Get the Full Details
Download and Setup
Keycaps Tracker Vintage runs in the browser. You can find it at keycapstracker.com and there's a free tier that handles up to 500 items and a paid tier that removes that ceiling and unlocks advanced export formats. I've been on the free tier with about 420 caps and it hasn't been an issue. The export function gives you CSV and PDF reports, which is enough if you just need a physical record or want to cross-reference with another inventory app. Setup takes about twenty minutes from registration to your first imported batch. The biggest time sink isn't the tool itself. It's actually identifying your caps correctly. You'll spend more time researching whether that weird high-profile set is genuine DCS or a later reproduction than you'll spend entering data. The tracker assumes you already know what you own. It won't tell you if a PBT set with double-shot legends is genuine or a modern restick replica. For that you need your own knowledge or communities like r MechanicalKeyboards where people will tear apart your photos and tell you exactly what you have whether you asked or not.
What It Doesn't Handle Well
There are real limitations. The mobile experience is barely functional. If you're trying to enter new acquisitions while at a swap meet or keyboard show, you're going to have a bad time. The interface isn't responsive and text fields are too small to tap reliably. I ended up just taking photos with my phone and entering everything later on my desktop. The photo attachment feature exists but the upload process is slow and sometimes drops images without warning. Don't trust it as your primary backup for condition documentation. Take screenshots of your entries as well. Another issue is duplicate detection. If you accidentally add the same keycap twice, there's no merge function. You have to manually delete one and recreate any notes or tags on the surviving entry. This sounds minor until you've entered forty caps and realize five of them are duplicates because you forgot to check. Budget an extra hour on the back end for deduplication pass. The database also lacks any kind of marketplace integration. You can't list caps directly from the tracker to eBay or relevant forums. I use a separate spreadsheet for sales tracking and just keep the two side by side. It's not elegant but it works. Some people in the community use Airtable as a companion layer on top of Keycaps Tracker Vintage data exports, which adds relational linking between caps and their source boards. That's probably the most powerful setup I've seen but it requires comfort with relational databases to do properly.
If your collection is under fifty caps, honestly just use a notebook. The overhead of setting up any digital tracker isn't worth it for a small bunch. This tool shines when you have a few hundred caps and need to answer questions like "do I have all the A keycaps from my Matias collections" or "which of my IBM keycaps are the green legends versus the black ones." That kind of query takes six seconds in the tracker and maybe twenty minutes flipping through labeled bags. I've been using Keycaps Tracker Vintage consistently for about four years now. It's not flashy. The UI hasn't aged well. But it's stable, it doesn't lose data, and it does exactly what I need it to do without requiring me to maintain a separate database or write custom queries. That's about as good as these things usually get.
