Labelling your equipment: numbering, label materials and where to stick them

A numbering scheme that survives contact with reality, label stock that lasts more than one season, and one placement rule per item type. For teams with a few hundred pieces of shared gear.

In this article

• Numbering: three rules and one decision
• What to print on the label
• Label materials: what actually survives
• Where the label goes
• Printing them
• Doing the first pass
• Where Itefy fits

Labelling gear looks like a job for an afternoon, and then you are standing in the store room holding a lens with nowhere obvious to put a sticker, wondering whether the number you just assigned is going to make sense in three years.

It is worth doing slowly once. A numbering scheme is very hard to change after 300 items are wearing it, and a label that peels in a road case will cost you the same afternoon again next season.

This assumes you have already decided what kind of label to print. If you have not, start with QR, barcode, RFID or NFC — for most small teams the answer is a QR code with the number printed beside it.

Numbering: three rules and one decision

Rule one: a number identifies an item, not a place, a person or a category. The temptation is to encode meaning — the department, the room, the year of purchase. Then the camera moves to a different department and its number is a lie. Everything about an item that can change belongs in the record, not in the identifier.

Rule two: never reuse a number. When an item is sold, stolen or scrapped, its number retires with it. Reuse it and every historical record that mentions it becomes ambiguous — and the one time that matters is an insurance claim or an audit, which is exactly when you cannot afford ambiguity.

Rule three: pad the digits. AV-007, not AV-7. Otherwise everything sorts wrongly forever, in every spreadsheet and every export, and item 10 files itself between 1 and 2.

The one decision worth making deliberately is whether to use a prefix. Two workable schemes:

• Flat sequence. 00001, 00002, 00003. Nothing means anything, nothing can go stale. Best if you have one pool of gear and one team.
• Prefix plus sequence. CAM-014, AUD-108, LTG-042. A short, permanent prefix for a broad class of thing — camera, audio, lighting — then a number that runs within it.

Prefixes buy you one real thing: a person reading a number aloud over a radio knows roughly what it is. They cost you the thing prefixes always cost — the day something sits between two categories, or a class you did not anticipate arrives. Keep the list of prefixes short, broad and closed. Three to eight is a healthy number. If you find yourself wanting CAM-DSLR- you have gone too far.

On the six identical microphones: each one gets its own number. This is the whole point. "Mic 3 is the one that crackles" is a fact you can act on; "one of the mics crackles" is not.

What to print on the label

Four things, and they earn their space in this order:

1. The number, as large as the label allows. This is what a person uses.
2. A QR code, if you are using one. This is what the system uses.
3. Your organisation's name. A found item with a name on it comes back; a found item with a bare number does not.
4. A short description, only if there is room. CAM-014 · C300 reads better on a shelf than CAM-014 alone.

Resist putting a phone number, a purchase date or a value on the label. The first goes stale, and the last is an invitation.

Label materials: what actually survives

This is where most first attempts fail. The label stock matters more than the printer.

Two specifics worth knowing. Thermal-transfer printing outlasts direct-thermal by years: direct thermal uses heat-sensitive paper that fades in sunlight and dies in a hot van, which is why the receipt in your glovebox is blank. And self-laminating cable labels — a printed area plus a clear tail that wraps over it — are the only thing that reliably survives on a cable; a plain sticker on a 6 mm lead has almost no contact area and will be gone by the second job.

Where the label goes

Decide once per item type, write it down, and never improvise. The point of a placement rule is that somebody can find the label without turning the item over.

• Camera bodies, mixers, boxes with a flat side: the base, near a corner, away from vents and battery doors.
• Lenses: the barrel, not the cap — caps get swapped. A small wrap label on the rear collar.
• Cables: both ends, 10–15 cm in from the connector. Both ends matters; you will be looking at the far one.
• Cases and flight cases: outside on the lid and inside, because the outside one is the one that gets scuffed off.
• Tripods and stands: the top section, above where hands go.
• Laptops and tablets: the base, not the lid — lids get stickered over and screens get replaced.
• Anything with a serial plate: next to it, not over it.

The one universal rule: never over a vent, a label from the manufacturer, a serial number, or anything that unscrews.

Printing them

You do not need a special printer to start. Three routes, in ascending order of commitment:

• A sheet of labels through an office laser printer. Cheapest way to do the first hundred. Laser toner is fused and survives handling; inkjet smudges when damp. Buy polyester sheets rather than paper.
• A desktop label printer. A DYMO or Brother unit is a modest purchase and makes the ongoing job painless. There are step-by-step walkthroughs for creating QR labels from a spreadsheet with DYMO ID and with P-touch Editor for Brother.
• An industrial thermal-transfer printer. Zebra and similar. Worth it once you are printing hundreds a year on polyester.

Whichever you use, print a test label and put it through a week of real life before you print three hundred. Stick it on the thing it is meant for, send it out on a job, and see what comes back.

Doing the first pass

An afternoon, done in this order, is usually enough for a couple of hundred items:

1. Decide the scheme — prefix or flat, how many digits — and write it down where the next person will find it.
2. List what you own before you label anything. Labelling and cataloguing at the same time means doing both badly.
3. Print in batches by item type, so the placement rule stays in your head.
4. Label the awkward things last — cables, small accessories — when you have your eye in.
5. Photograph each item with its label on as you go. This costs nothing at the time and is the single most useful thing you will have if something is stolen.

Where Itefy fits

If the numbers live in a spreadsheet, the labels and the list drift apart the first week somebody adds an item without updating both.

In Itefy the number is the record: every item gets its identifier when you create it, and the QR labels are generated from the register — a sheet at a time, or one at a time for a new arrival — so what is printed on the gear and what is in the system cannot disagree. Scanning one with any phone opens that item: its history, condition, who has it and what kit it belongs to.

The photographs from step 5 belong on the item record too, alongside the serial number and the receipt. There is a 14-day free trial with no card if you want to load a hundred items and print a sheet before committing.

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