Tellico Turns 25!

Depending exactly on when I mark the date, Tellico is turning 25 years old this month. The ChangeLog tells me I released Bookcase 0.1 on November 4, 2001. Bookcase was the original name of the application. I renamed it to Tellico after I was contacted by another software developer.

I thought it would be fun to look back at a few of the milestones.

November 2001
Bookcase 0.1 is released.
February 2002
Bookcase 0.2 is released, notable since the second release is harder than the first, right?
November 2003
The first home page goes live.
January 2004
Images are added to the collection for Bookcase 0.8. along with several new collection types.
September 2004
Bookcase is renamed Tellico, with version 0.12 the first release with the new name.
May 2005
The tellico-users mailing list is first established, hosted by Novell Forge.
September 2005
Tellico 1.0 is released!
June 2006
Templates for what later became KDE Store were launched.
May 2009
Tellico moves into KDE Extragear, hosted by KDE itself, and away from Novell Forge (which shut down not too long after).
August 2009
Tellico gets its own domain name, tellico-project.org. Having a dedicated domain finally implies a real project, no?
September 2009
Tellico 2.0, the first release for KDE4, is made available. I was very excited about it but rather quickly found a bug.
May 2011
Tellico followed the lead of many programs and transitioned from subversion to git.
November 2016
Tellico 3.0 is released, the first version using Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.
February 2022
The first testing version of Tellico for Windows is built.
September 2024
Tellico 4.0 is released, the first version to leverage Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6.

All told, it’s been a fun journey, with fits and spurts of development or personal life leading to a pause. I use Tellico for my books, videos, old music albums, and coin collection, personally. We’ll see how long it continues!

Tellico 4.3 Released

Tellico 4.3 is available, with some additional capabilities, improvements, and bug fixes. I’ve received several code contributions from new people in the last few months and I wanted to say thanks. Depending a little on how I count it, Tellico turns 25 years old next month. It’s always been a hobby; I’m not a programmer by trade or training, and so I’m always gratified when other folks find my little tool useful and provide feedback, bug fixes, and even code contributions.
(more…)

Linux Magazine Reviews Tellico

Linux Magazine discusses Tellico in their September 2026 issue, in an article titled Let’s Collect, which covers Tellico, Recoll, Asunder, and Picard, among others.

In this article we’re looking at Linux applications that you may want to try out if you already have a collection of physical books, ebooks, CDs, or other media, or are just starting to collect. You can create a catalog that stores metadata of your collection items, index ebooks to make their content searchable, and rip CDs so that you can play them on the computer, too.

The author, Hans-Georg Eßer, favorably mentions saving separate collection files for each type (books, coins, discs, etc.) which is nice. He does directly mention the Internet Search dialog, so I’m glad to see that the UI adjustments were effective. He even goes as far as showing fetch results from three different sources in the screenshot! The capability to drag an image into the Entry Editor was noted, which I appreciate. An extended section covered importing from CSV, which does seem to be functionality that just about every user needs at some point. His explanation of the process is much better than mine.

One of the gotchas that the article mentions is the .tc file extension was not automatically added to the saved file name. I suspect the author might not have been using the Plasma-desktop, or at least, not the KDE file integration, since the save dialog is supposed to have an option to do just that. So for the next release, I’ll automatically append .tc if there is no extension selected. That issue has popped up in other reviews, too.

Linux Magazine has mentioned Tellico a few other time, including June 2025 and as far back as August 2005.

Tellico 4.2 Released

Tellico 4.2 is available, with some improvements and bug fixes. This release now requires Qt6 (> 6.5) as well as KDE Frameworks 6. One notable behavior change is that when images are removed from the collection, the image files themselves are also removed from the collection data folder.

Users have provided substantial feedback in a number of areas to the mailing list recently, which is tremendously appreciated. I’m always glad to hear how Tellico is useful and how it can be better. Back up those data files!

(more…)