Any suggestions for a selfhosted comic book collection manager? I.e. a database of the physical comics that I own.
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Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything better than Calibre at the moment. (Though, I’m happy to be proven wrong!) Nothing against Calibre, it’s functionally amazing free software and it works very well; I said “unfortunately” because the interface is extremely dated and clunky and confusing to operate. Once you get it working, it’s very nice though. As long as you never have to go fiddling with it again, because every time you’ve gotta reacquaint with it’s weird UI. Still, it really is the best available at the moment, and it’s free so that’s awesome.
My favorite way to set it up is using the linuxserver image, which has a web-based VNC built into it, so you can remotely run the app on a headless server and then use your browser to interact with it.
I have Calibre configured to monitor a folder for new stuff I throw into it, where it’ll automatically fetch metadata and put it into the database. Calibre also has an OPDS server built in, to which I point a nicer frontend for reading comics. Currently that is Kavita which provides a decent web UI for both books and comics.
Anyhow, I believe you could enter data about your physical comics into the Calibre database, and then view the metadata with something like Kavita, though of course you’d be skipping the reading features.
Thanks for the suggestion. I think that might be too much work for my needs though.
Hello, I’ve no idea what is special about managing a comic collection?
What are the special need?
I know too tools that can be helpful for you though:
- https://bookwyrm.social/ a social book manager and
- https://www.getgrist.com/ a general nocode database
🙂
Scraping metadata. Wish/purchase/pull lists. Keeping track of multiple editions. Perhaps even scraping entire collections/storylines into manageable lists?
At the very least a quick way to use my phone to check if I already have a specific comic when I’m at the store.
Grist might be useful if I end up setting more than a spreadsheet up, thanks.
Hmm could you use something like https://www.kavitareader.com/ and for items just add a single title image of the comic (with real title ect). So it shows up in your list?
