Collections vs Libraries for magazines?

[v-marinkov]

I started using Komga exclusively for pdf magazines. My instinct was to have a folder structure of broad topics inside which wound be individual folders for a given magazine:

- Business
- - Barron's
- - HBR
- Economic & Politics
- - Economist
- - Foreign Affairs
- etc...

Then, I would add each categorically sub-folder as a separate library. The idea was to have easy navigation by topic instead seeing my econ stuff jumbled with my wife's gardening stuff.

However, I realise there are also collections and I wonder what is the best way to organise my magazines by category.

Both can be filtered for sharing (collections with labels). I guess a benefit of collections is that a series can belong to more than 1 collection. Also, they are more visual with their own covers, whilst libraries are prominent in the sidebar and can be unpinned. Libraries are also folder-based which i like but again the limitation of a series belonging only to 1.

I do plan to share the server with family and filtering (inc. age restriction) might potentially be useful.

Any advice on the best organisation are welcome! Thanks

[gotson]

It depends.

Collections or metadata like tags require either to have embedded metadata for automatic import, or to be curated manually. Libraries are straightforward, because folder based, but won't scale well. Don't create more than 15-20 libraries.

[v-marinkov]

Thanks. Yes, I had a feeling that more than 5-7 libraries would be using Komga wrong.

Regarding collections, you mean manual curation in the sense of manually adding a new series to an existing collection, but new issues of an existing series in a collection get added automatically, right?

As for metafata, does Komga support extracting metadata from pdf? I embedded Calibre style metadata to the pdf files but it didn't see it. For what it's worth, Kavita does read that metadata but their pdf reader is awful, hence why I settled on Komga.

[gotson]

Regarding collections, you mean manual curation in the sense of manually adding a new series to an existing collection, but new issues of an existing series in a collection get added automatically, right?

yes, a collection is a group of series.

As for metafata, does Komga support extracting metadata from pdf?

No, mostly because there is no standard, there would be more crap coming out than good. It's been requested here: #1536