Online Resources: All Things "Colnect"

The drop down switch for the display to show # stamps per page is in upper left corner of the thumbnail page display



you can display anywhere from 10 to 250 images per page (I usually use 100 myself).

To add to djcmh’s Colnect update - the first 1,000 Irish commemoratives now have Hibernian numbers, too. Slowly but surely getting there.

I recently won a fairly extensive collection of international and Stampa show overprints so once I finish the primary numbers I’ll add listings for these exhibition souvenirs. 

I’ve also been discussing listing minor variants with other collectors. djcmh can correct me if I’m wrong, but if a variant is listed with a unique number in a catalog approved by Colnect then it is fair game to be listed as a minor variant. If I can get good pics of these then I’ll try to add them. 

I’ll probably post a notice in the Eire Philatelic Association journal, The Revealer, to find pics of some of the more scarce varieties. 

So if you’re not using Colnect - check it out!

I am currently working on my collection of Faroese stamps and am also preparing album pages for them. I thought that using Colnect would make this easier, as it would save me having to measure the sizes of the stamps, among other things.

Unfortunately, I was at least partly wrong: some of the sizes given on Colnect are not correct.

I then used the stamp search site of the UPU as another source. A big surprise for me: the errors on Colnect and the UPU site were (almost) identical!

You can probably only recognize such errors if you have real access to the stamps in question and experience with them. This was probably not the case here, or else the trust in the correctness of the UPU information was/is unlimited.

So I guess I'll have to continue measuring the sizes of the stamps, at least of the Faroe Islands, myself...

With these remarks I do not want to question the extensive work that many volunteers do for Conect and thus for us stamp collectors! On the contrary: I thank them very much!!!

rednaxela if you do find errors on the sizes, please do consider using the "Improve our Catalogue" dialogue box on each stamp's main page so that we can correct the data.

A little update on Colnect now that we are in the New Year

The shiftover from the old special variant system to the new minor variant system is about 80% complete. When we started there were over 50K items to move, we are now down to just a bit over 12K.

There will probably not be any more major organizational/structural changes coming to the stamps catalgoue - after about 5 year I think we now have the catalogue in a position where it is fairly easy to navigate and allows for items like cinderellas and revenues to be properly listed while not clogging up the main postage stamp listings. This means more time can be spent on filling the gaps in terms of content, especially from specialized catalogues going forward.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the catalogue's functionality, please don't hesitate to post them here or PM me here or over at Colnect.

On colnect, the maxicards are "buried" here:

colnect.com/en/postcards/list/type/5-Maximum_Card?fbclid=IwAR3grkg_nC_FZlR2nWATSvfTDhF2B6zQhiERgiVzz-slU7c_wv1u1rYNgBI

www.facebook.com/groups/maximaphily/permalink/8003307113018040/?app=fbl

Yes. When the categories were originally set up back long before I even joined Colnect, the decision was to put Maximaphily under postcards. Why that was done I do not know, but was before the Philatelic Products was created as a spinoff from stamps (due to catalogue bloat from First Day Covers at a time when there was no subcategory system of organization in stamps). I guess those in charge at the start in Colnect felt maximum cards fit better in postcards rather than stamps, but have no idea regarding how the decision was made.

But Maximum Cards do have a home on Colnect.

When you first open the Colnect stamp catalogue for India, you are given a year list that looks like this - you'll notice I have highlighted the "Stamps" link because that's what I choose to make it look a bit more like a Scott (or Michel or SG or whatever) catalogue.



After clicking the "Stamps" link, I like to order things by catalogue number.  Notice the highlighted "Sort:" drop box.  There are a number of choices - pick the one that suits you best, but in this case I have chosen the "Sn code", which is the equivalent to the Scott catalogue number.  The list of all stamps is then sorted alphanumerically according to the catalogue number, so all the air post stamps & official stamps and other back-of-the-book issues with a letter prefix are sorted after everything beginning with a digit.  Any listing without the Sn code gets appended at the end.  Note that in some cases (like some fiscal stamps) this is because there is no Scott catalogue number for them, but in other cases it's just because nobody has entered the code into the Colnect database yet.  For example, 2017 has 418 stamps with a Michel catalogue number entered, 243 stamps with the Gibbons number, but only 79 stamps (so far) with the Sn code entered.



You can see a highlight on the "Series:" data entry - that's a clickable link, you'll get all the stamps listed under that series if you click on it.  Again, that list might be incomplete due to that data item not being entered for all of the stamps - if you find a stamp that hasn't been tagged with the correct series, you can send that info to Colnect and Gene (or whoever) can fix it.  Same thing with missing catalogue numbers - if you see a problem, help to fix it.

For people who aren't signed up with Colnect, your usefulness of the site drops a lot.  First off, you get endless nag screens that you have to click away from.  Also, you're limited to displaying only 10 stamps per page.  That takes an awful long time to work your way through listings for a country like India with 5,684 stamps listed ...

Ryan

In general the country setups are roughly based on Michel as that was the catalogue used both most of the early contributors to Colnect in the early 2010s. So Germany is split this way following Michel conventions, and is thus very much exception to the rule since most countries are not split by historical era (hence all India together). China and Russia are thus treated the same with splits based on eras that catalogues like Gibbons and Scott treat differently.

Germany is the oddest because the original creators of Colnect did not create a base Germany. For them pre-1945 Germany and modern Federal Republic are two distinct postal administations.  So "Germany" is just the broader concept of "the German region" that has all the various subgroups since when Colnect was first created for stamps, the initial creators felt there should be two separate listings pre and pos 1945. To Anglophone-catalogue based users used to a single Germany that goes Reich-Allied Occupation-Federal Republic this is counterintuitive but suggestions to create a single Germany listing starting Reich to Federal Republic have been opposed by Colnect users in the past who prefer the split. And so Germany is the way it is, since once the sub grouping concept for organization was created in 2020, there was no single Germany postal administration, so Germany is a "hollow" listing for organization purposes only.

To this day the majority of users of Colnect remain continental European for whom Michel is the main catalogue of reference, and really only in past few years have Anglophone users based on Scott and Gibbons become a significant community, and the difference worldviews in how things are organized sometimes creates issues. But in the end the base of Colnect is Michel's organization and how early Colnect users interpreted that organizalong which has its own oddness, especially for non-Michel based collectors. One of the pitfalls of trying to create a universal catalogue is that its base will resemble most closely that of those who began the creation process.

Hence for example the split between British South Africa Company and Rhodesia, which are split in Michel but one single country in Scott and Gibbons (Rhodesia). Here the decision to keep them split was in part also done to help novice collectors who do not know the history of the era, and thus with a BSA stamp would not think to look under Rhodesia at first glance.

In the end the subgroup system that is the default setup in Colnect can be changed in user account section so that every single subgroup is shown separately in full. Bear in Ming though that this will make the main index page around 2000 lines long which has its own inconveniences especially for users on mobile devices.

And although "Deutsche Post" was written on German stamps between 1945 and 1949, the four Allies each had their own postal authority. Post-war Germany was also anything but a uniform postal territory.

Just wanted to offer a tip of the ol' Stetson to Colnect as a recent search turned up a useful handful of Oranges Citrus items I had not yet found/bought which resulted in 2 purchases off Colnect, one thanks to a direct link to eBay for the item.

Is anyone having trouble accessing Colnect today (3 August 2024). I was working on Colnect when suddenly was no longer able to connect, and now all i get are connection timed out messages. Colnect is the only website I am having this problem with on my browser (Chrome) all other websites accessing fine. I've cleared my cookies folder and did a DNS flush but still not able to access.

Any ideas of what else i can try on my end??

djcmh , I was just able to login without difficulty. I am using a chromebook.