Jan. 2023¶

This is a work in progress. The whole guide is not completely done yet!

Introduction¶

I've been an avid user of Comicrack for years. It is so far the only application that can tag, organize, rename and display comics all in one. Nothing comes close. Unfortunately the development stopped years ago and the developer disappeared.

I normally purchase my comics on Comixology, Humble Bundle or in print. Comics with DRM, i normally make a fake comic file with a single image that just states where the comic is available. Eg. if i bought a comic on Comixology i make a single page image and write "Comic purchased on Comixology". I do the same with all my physical comics where i write "Physical Comic". That way i can organize my DRM-free collection together with my DRM and physical collections.

This guide is meant for users of /r/comicrackusers, and should be seen as a complimentary guide to the official manual. The official manual is great but it doesn't talk much about workflows and how to create the optimal setup.

The base for my setup and workflow is based on /u/Enliqhtened's great work in their two part guide (Part 1 and Part 2). Unfortunately Reddit's formatting is not the greatest and I hope that my updated guide can help new and old users.

What I'm describing in this guide is the setup I've been using for the past two years. For my collection it works very well and I've tried to account for most things.

Prerequisites¶

This guide assumes the following:

You have a working ComicRack installation (see /r/comicrackusers for help)
Comics are located at B:/Comics/ (this will be seen in the screenshots, you can have them elsewhere, but you have to change paths in scripts and screenshots)
You have the scripts mentioned in the next section
You have a Comicvine API Key

Scripts¶

Most scripts can be found on the reddit sticky.

I'll clearly state which scripts are used in each section.

This is a complete list of scripts used:

Folder structure¶

As mentioned in Prerequisites I have my comics in B:/Comics/. I've a simple folder structure where the top level folders are created manually and all the folders below are generated using Library Organizer.

B:/ 
└───Comics
    └───ComicRack
    │   └───DC Comics
    │   └───Marvel
    │   └───OniPress
    │       └───Series X
    │           │   comicX.cbz
    │           │   ...
    │   
    └───0day
    │   └───random comics
    │   │   │   comic0.cbz
    │   │   │   ...
    │   │   comic1.cbz
    │   │   comic2.cbr
    │   │   comic3.pdf
    │   │   ...
    │   
    └───Ignored
        └───random comics
        │   │   comic4.cbz
        │   │   ...
        │   comic5.cbz
        │   comic6.cbr
        │   comic7.pdf
        │   ...

For this guide to work it is important to have the three top level folders:

ComicRack
- Used for all your organized comics. Sorted using Library Organizer into folders.
0day
- The comics you want to orgnize. New comics (DRM-free or fake comics for DRM/Physical comics) are added here.
Ignored
- The comics that i cannot scrape correctly or that I don't want in Comicrack. I am a huge fan of Don Rosa and I have a lot of home-scanned single story comics, that i scanned from my physical weekly Donal Duck issues. These cannot really be scraped properly and I organize them myself in this folder.

Guide layout¶

The guide the split up into 8 parts where each part has its own set of lists, actions and workflows. The parts are the following:

01 - Clean Up
- Will go through the cleaning the raw file, removing bad files, converting the file, etc.
02 - 02 - Comicvine Scraper TPB DC
- Will tag bad on specific criteries
03 - Comicvine Scraper
- Will tag the rest
04 - Add Count
- Adding count to series. This can be optional.
05 - Datamanager
- Adding extra info based on the series, characters, publisher, etc.
06 - Format
- Adding format such as TBP, Main Series, One-Shot, etc.
07 - Duplicates
- Finding and removing duplicates
08 - Library Organizer
- Moving and renaming files
09 - Write to File
- Making sure ComicInfo.xml is written to the file.

Each of these has several substeps which will be described in their respective sections.

Comicrack layout¶

In Comicrack i have a simple layout as seen here:

Comicrack 
└───Library
│
└───Smart Lists
    └───Webcomics (Optional)
    │   Smart list searching for webcomics format
    │
    └───Fix It (Optional)
    │   Smart list that i change based on what i currently need to fix and/or look at
    │
    └───Library (Mandatory)
    │   Smart list that only shows comics that has been tagged using Comicvine.
    │
    └───Currently Reading (Optional)
    │   Smart list that shows comic with the status of currently reading
    │
    └───Read (Optional)
    │   Smart list that shows comic with the status of read
    │
    └───Ignored Comics (Optional)
    │   Smart list that search for comics in the Ignored folder.
    │
    └───Story Arcs (Optional)
    │   Folder that contains story arcs in subfolders or smartlists. This is where i usually read comics from
    │
    └───Workflow (Mandatory)
        └───00 - Archive (Optional)
        │
        └───01 - Sorting (Mandatory)
            └───01 - Clean Up
            └───02 - Comicvine Scraper ComicTagger
            └───...

I suggest you make the mandatory folders and the mandatory smart list Library. The smart list is:

The smart list can be downloaded from Library.cbl.

This list is used to filter out files from the Ignored folder and cbw files, which are webcomic files. I am using this library as the base for most of my lists later on.

How to read the guide¶

As you are now done reading the introduction, you should go to 01 - Clean Up. Each section will consist of a short introduction with the folder structure of the section. 01 - Clean Up consists of 8 subsections labeled 1.1 to 1.8.

Starting with 1.1 you will see an image of the smart list used in the section. Below the image there will be a download link to the cbl file, which is a smart list file you can import directly into ComicRack.

Next up is a bit of text explaining why this step is done.

Finally there's three boxes. One will be a column layout suggestion, which is the column layout i use for this specific smart list. The other two boxes will be the action required to be performed on the comics in the smart list and a list of the scripts used.

If there isn't any scripts used, it will show None.