Scan and Track Your Video Game Collection with Python

If you’re a serious collector of console games, you may wonder what your stash is worth, or simply want to catalog them to keep track of what you have. If you’re to the point where you actually need a catalog system to keep everything straight, recording everything by hand could take a very long time.

For this purpose, game enthusiast and YouTuber Ryan Bates employed a scanner to input each game’s UPC code with the push of a button. His setup — which runs on a Raspberry Pi 3, but could run on a normal PC — uses Python with the Beautiful Soup library in order to scrape data from pricecharting.com, giving him the game’s name, genera, release date, and price. Data can then be input into Excel to chart the collection to his heart’s content!

Check out the video seen here for a great explanation of the process. He notes that the software is a work-in-progress, but can make it available upon request.