Getting started

I built Packle to answer one question: where did I put that? This page is the fastest way from "just opened the app" to "actually using it."

Your first item

Hit the "+" button wherever you find it — the items screen, or inside any container you've already made. Type a name. Save. That's a real item in your inventory, and it's genuinely enough to start.

Everything else about an item is optional and can happen whenever it's convenient, not when you create it:

• A photo. Attach one later from your camera roll or shoot it on the spot; Packle resizes it and generates the crops it needs for cards and detail views automatically. The first photo you add becomes the primary image shown on the item's card — change which one is primary any time.
• A barcode. Scan it to fetch a name and image automatically instead of typing them. See Scanning & barcodes.
• A task. "Return to Sarah," "buy replacement filter" — add one inline while creating the item, or later from the item itself.

There's also a dedicated quick-capture flow built for the moment you're standing in front of a pile of stuff with your phone out: open the camera, snap a photo, name it, done — built for adding several things in a row without opening a form each time.

Items vs. containers

Packle only has one kind of thing: the item. A container is just an item with one switch flipped — "this can hold other items." That's the entire organizational model. There's no separate folder concept, no "location" object, no second UI to learn for organizing versus storing.

Flip an item to a container in the item editor and it starts behaving like one: tap into it and you're looking at what's inside, with a breadcrumb trail back to where you came from. Nothing has to be pre-planned as a container from the start — a plain item can become one the moment it actually needs to hold something. The full mechanics — nesting, breadcrumbs, drag-and-drop reordering, deleting a container full of things — are in Containers & hierarchy.

Trying it in pure offline mode

Open Packle without creating an account and you're already using it in pure offline mode — no signup screen, no setup step, nothing to configure. Everything you add lives on your device, in the browser's own storage, and stays there. There's no server round trip and no account for a password to get lost.

This isn't a limited trial — it's a genuinely permanent way to use Packle. If you never want an inventory that leaves your phone or laptop, pure offline mode is the whole app, for free, indefinitely. It also happens to be the fastest way to kick the tires before deciding whether you want more.

Switching to online mode

Online mode is what you get once you create an account, and it's a superset, not a different app. Everything pure offline mode does, online mode still does. On top of that, your inventory syncs across every device you sign into, and it lives somewhere other than one browser's local storage — so a lost or wiped device doesn't mean a lost inventory.

If you've already built something in pure offline mode, signing up migrates all of it into your new account — every item, container, task, tag, and image — with nothing left behind and nothing duplicated. The full vocabulary, plus how per-item sync modes work once you're signed in, is in Pure offline mode & online mode.

Get started free whenever you're ready — it's free during early access, and early-access accounts keep their pricing when paid tiers eventually launch.