Help the community: scan the barcode on your next bottle

In short: Cellarion can now recognise a wine by the barcode on the bottle. The first person to scan a barcode teaches it to everyone. After that, anyone who scans the same barcode lands on the right wine in about a second, with no label photo and no AI call. The barcode list starts empty and can only be filled by members, so for a while most barcodes will be new to Cellarion. Keep scanning the label as usual, then give the barcode too: the next person will find the wine in a second. 🍷

What's new

When you add a bottle, the camera already reads the label. Now it also watches for the barcode while it is open, usually the one on the back label.

• A barcode someone has already added takes you straight to that wine. No label photo, no waiting for the AI.
• A barcode nobody has added yet is noted, and you take the label photo as usual. When you save the bottle, the barcode is saved with it, so the next person who scans it finds the wine at once.
• Already picked the wine by searching or scanning the front label? In the next step you will see “Help the community: scan the barcode on this bottle”. Tap Scan barcode, point the camera at the barcode, and that's it.

Why we need your help

There is no complete list of wine barcodes we could simply load in. Wine is made in thousands of places, the same wine can carry a different barcode in different countries, and the open lists that exist cover only a small share of the wines in people's cellars.

We also checked whether the bottle photos already in Cellarion could give us a head start. They can't: across thousands of photos, only about one in two hundred shows a barcode that can be read. That makes sense, since most of us photograph the front label, and the barcode lives on the back.

So the barcode list will be built the same way the wine library was: one bottle at a time, by the people who use it. Every barcode you scan is one the next person doesn't have to.

Every barcode helps keep Cellarion free

Everything in Cellarion is free, for everyone. Reading a label with AI is one of the few things that costs us real money every single time it happens. Looking up a barcode costs nothing: it is a simple search in our own database.

So once a barcode is known, every later bottle of that wine is added without an AI call, by everyone, for as long as Cellarion exists. A minute of your help today keeps saving money long after, and that money is what lets us keep every feature free while more people join.

It is faster for you, too: about a second from pointing the camera to having the wine in front of you.

How to help, in three steps

For now, most barcodes will be new to Cellarion, so the label is still the fastest way to find your wine. The barcode is what you give the next person:

1. Add the bottle as usual: scan the front label, or search for the wine.
2. In the next step, tap Scan barcode and point the camera at the barcode. It is read automatically; there is nothing to press.
3. Save the bottle. The barcode is saved with it.

Happen to show the camera the barcode first? That works too: if someone has already added it, you go straight to the wine; if it is new, the camera keeps it for you and asks for the label photo. And if you have a few bottles from the same box, one scan is enough. As the list grows, more and more of your scans will be the one-second kind.

Can a barcode point to the wrong wine?

We built it to stay right even when someone makes a mistake:

• Misreads are caught. Every retail barcode ends in a check digit, and a code that doesn't add up is ignored. Shop-internal codes, the kind a supermarket prints for its own use, are ignored too, since the same number means different things in different shops.
• People are counted, not bottles. If people disagree about a barcode, the wine confirmed by the most different members wins. Someone adding twelve bottles counts once, so one person's mistake can't take over.
• The vintage is only filled in when people agree. Many wines keep the same barcode year after year, so we only suggest a vintage when at least two people have the same one.
• You can always correct it. If the barcode suggests the wrong wine, tap Change wine and pick the right one. Your bottle then counts as a vote for the right wine.

Your privacy

• The barcode is read on your own phone or computer. No camera image is sent anywhere for it.
• The barcode is saved on your own bottle. It is part of your data export and is deleted when the bottle is.
• Other members only ever see the wine a barcode belongs to, never whose bottle it came from.

Also new: scan a receipt (beta)

Bought several bottles at once? On the Import page you can now photograph the receipt, or upload a screenshot or PDF of an online order, and the wines on it become rows you check and match before anything is added. Quantities, price per bottle, shop and date come along; beer, deposits and bags are left out. It is a beta: to fix reading mistakes, a scanned receipt is kept for 5 days and then deleted automatically.

Thank you

Cellarion's wine library was built by its members, and the barcode list will be too. Every scan makes adding a bottle a little faster for the next person, and keeps Cellarion a little easier to run for free. If anything looks wrong, or you have an idea for making this better, tell us through Support. We read everything.