As anyone who’s registered for wedding gifts will tell you, handheld bar code scanners are fun. This one especially.

At $179, a tiny scanner that looks like a garage-door opener but actually reads the bar codes that are already printed on your media is a hefty investment. But then again, your media collection--all of your books, CDs, video games, and movies--is quite an investment too. You can use the IntelliScanner mini to scan and log bar codes to track and organize your media, and with add-on apps it can wrangle your comic books, wine, groceries, and the rest of your worldly goods too. And for items that aren’t bar coded, you can slap on your own bar code stickers (IntelliScanner calls them Asset Tags; 10 come free with the mini and they sell for $24 per 100 additional).

To use the IntelliScanner mini, just point it at a bar code, press the Scan button, and enjoy the satisfying beep that signals a successful scan. Be sure to have the Media app (or one of the extra apps, including Kitchen, Comics, Wine, and Assets, which can be bundled or purchased separately) open when you connect the scanner to your Mac, because the transfer happens immediately and automatically, and once the bar codes are transferred, they’re deleted from the scanner’s memory. We had TextEdit as the active application once when plugging the scanner in, and the barcodes were added to our text file, forcing us to either rescan them or paste each bar code into the Media app one by one.

The Media app (we reviewed version 3.2) looks up your bar codes in an online database and creates searchable records for your media collection that include tons of information: title, author, release date, starting price, purchase date, cover art, and more. Integration with Address Book lets you note when you’ve loaned items to friends, and generating an email asking about an item’s status takes one click. You can create smart collections based on various criteria, and publish your collection to a free account at www.intelliscanner.net. You can even track collections added to that website by your friends, by selecting File > New Remote Media Collection.

The scanner is fun to use, and the app is easy to learn. Publishing your collection couldn’t be simpler, and the Web interface is iPhone-friendly. We wanted a little more flexibility in creating smart collections--we couldn’t create one for all our games that had the Played box checked, for example.

Collectors can get more mileage from the IntelliScanner mini by using the other available apps too: Wine lets you track your vino collection down to the position in a rack, with space for ratings, tasting notes, a URL, and more--and the app also supports publishing and remote collections.

The Comics app’s powers include the ability to track both traditional comic books and to automatically download and store Web comics. It even lets you print Comic Tag sheets (with info and a unique barcode) to store in the bags with your comics, for easy inventory. Kitchen lets you keep an inventory of items in your pantry: Scan items in when you bring them home, then scan ’em out as you use them up to create shopping lists.

And the Assets app lets you keep a detailed home inventory, extremely useful for insurance purposes. All the apps have a similar interface and the ability to export records as CSV, XML, TXT, and tab-delimited files. Not everything you scan will be found in IntelliScanner’s databases, and manually entering info for unknown items is tedious--after all, it’s the scut work you’re hoping to avoid by scanning things in the first place. But the apps remember anything you’ve entered, if you ever scan the same bar code again.