ComicBook Lover/ComicRack Metadata compatibility

I'm pretty new to this software, but I'm wondering if there is something similar to comictagger I can use to mass tag my comics? I'm doing it manually for now, and it's a bit of a pain. Any help would be great.

YACReaderLibrary includes its own scraper to do that. You can select all the comics in a series and get the tags from ComicVine.

It is the button to the right to the edit button.

Sorry to revive this settled topic, but is there an ETA on this feature? If not, has it been struck out of the release schedule? I would greatly appreciate ComicRack metadata import support, or atleast the ability to read xml files built into the files written by CR.

Hi netherking,

it is fine to revive this topic. Luis and I did discuss XML import in general and ComicRack specifically a few times. but we havent't started implementing anything. YACReader for PC and Mac is basically just an Open Source project we work on in our free time, which is a ressource that is not always available, so we often can't say when we will work on something (and we have a huuuuuuuge list with ideas and todo stuff).

Still, xml support is a feature that would render YACReader usable for a lot of people, including you, so we still are interested in making this work.

Registered an account to just post this:

+1 for xml

Since this is requested regularly I'd like to point out a few things that can be done to speed things up a little. If we want to implement metadata import, we roughly have this todo list:

1. Research the format specification for all metadata files we want to support
2. Compare the available metadata entries with YACReader's available database entries
3. Map foreign metadata to YACReader's metadata, decide what to do with edge cases
4. Aquire a set of example files that are fully tagged in all metadata format and legal (not pirated!!!) comics
5. Add metadata detection to our library and comic routines
6. Run tests to make sure it is working correctly
7. Write some basic import routines for the most important tags
8. Add logic to handle edge cases like multiple metadata files present and other stuff
9. Finetune our import dialog to make all options available

As you can see this is a feature that isn't implemented quickly. If you want to help out, you can create a bug on our Github page and start working on collecting the info that is needed to actually start the task.

To that list I would add an option to re-scan the comics in a library for metada (posibliy add an option to do it for a folder or a spedific file). Once this is implemented people will want the metadata available for the comics already in the library.

Some help with this would be great, anyone?

Hey, sorry for the late reply.

Check comment #26776 . According to said comment, unless the option to store data within the comic files is turned on, the data is stored in %appdata%/cyo/comicrack. ComicBookDB.xml. This file contains data on pretty much the entire library, but in specific the required metadata. I'm working on obtaining a copy of this file with personal information removed. A later comment in the thread also details how Preferences -> Advanced -> Backup Data allows you to take a backup of this xml file. I feel the optimal way to proceed would be to provide a pop-up with instructions on how to do this data back-up in ComicRack, and then read the data from that file.

If the option to store metadata within the file is turned on, it is stored in an .xml in the comic file itself. Check the picture below to for an example. This link has a sample .xml file which ComicRack inserts into the comic file in the outer most layer. I'm working on an example xml file with every single metadata tag filled right now.

As far as ComicRack is concerned, I feel these two would be sufficient for metadata import and support. I additionally would appreciate if there was an option to bake the metadata into the comic file, the way it could be done on ComicRack. Finally, I would greatly appreciate it if there were an option to batch process files in the YACreader ComicVine Scraper.

Due to time constraints I cannot work on technical or code related aspects of this metadata support project. Due to DRM related reasons, I cannot share the comic files themselves. I'm also not sure when I'll be able to prepare the files that I talked about above. I'd appreciate it if some other ComicRack users pitched in.

A ComicRack library importer isn't the same as a comic file metadata importer. It might seem similar at first glance and the implementation of both shares some common tasks, but the library importer is way more complex.

We will be targeting metadata import, not library import, at least for now. I'd also like to point out that modifying comic book archives by adding metadata is considered bad practice by most comic communities I am aware of and YACReader shares this philosophy of keeping the files pristine. Adding an export option in form of a companion metadata file which can be placed alongside the comic file would be possible though.

selmf wrote: A ComicRack library importer isn't the same as a comic file metadata importer. It might seem similar at first glance and the implementation of both shares some common tasks, but the library importer is way more complex.

We will be targeting metadata import, not library import, at least for now. I'd also like to point out that modifying comic book archives by adding metadata is considered bad practice by most comic communities I am aware of and YACReader shares this philosophy of keeping the files pristine. Adding an export option in form of a companion metadata file which can be placed alongside the comic file would be possible though.

My understanding is that if the option to save metadata within the comic file is not turned on, the only place that metadata is stored is the library file. Does this mean that people who leave the comic file untouched will be unable to import metadata from CR?

Saving the metadata in the same folder would be great if possible by the way.