How do you organize your downloads?

[Kevin Yong]

Between the titles I've been downloading here (and at the GAC site, and the various Golden Age torrent files online) I'm starting to accumulate quite a large collection of .cbr and .cbz files. I've been backing them up to an external hard drive just to keep my desktop's download folder from getting too cluttered, but that leads me to ask: how do the other users here organize all your files after you download them?

Personally, I'm trying to decide between organizing the comic files into subfolders by publisher, or by title, or both. I'm curious to what other people's experience has been. Any suggestions?

-- Kevin Yong   

[Yoc]

Publisher/title for most
Artist name/title for favourite creators

[JonTheScanner]

publisher/title usually for smaller publishers
publisher/genre/title or
publisher/era/title for other publishers

For example
DC/war/Our Army at War
DC/humor/Scribbly,
etc.

or

EC/pretrend/Animal Fables
EC/newtrend/Weird Science
etc.

[NobbyNobbs]

I use ComicRack to read & organize my collection, together with a few scripts for scraping data about comics, and for copying/renaming comics, tagging, etc.- my collection are slowly getting organized.
As I like to enter creators, publishers, etc.- the biggest problem is that Comicvine have to much wrong information about older comics, so I generally enter info about Golden Age comics manually, with GCD as reference.

[narfstar]

Primarily publisher then title for most but genre or title for Charlton

[builderboy]

Another key piece is the naming of the file.  If, like most here, you have a directory structure of Publisher/Title  (I would like to add  Publisher/Title/Volume for some titles), the next step is how the folder looks when you open it up.  Unless you rename files that you download, then your folder will be a mess. Folks use a million conventions, and you need to pick one that you like, and rename the files as you download them in order for them to sort properly.

I use, for example:

1940-12 Jungle Comics 012 [c2c 68p] JVJ-BB.cbz

...where the date is first to make sure that books sort if you have more than one volume in a folder (think Blue Bolt, for example).  I make sure that I capture whether a book is c2c and the page count, in case a book is incomplete and gets later upgraded.  Plus, I always try to hang onto the uploader's tag in the name, because sometimes it is not contained in the file itself, and could be lost. Otherwise, how could I locate the high quality scans later by guys like Cimmerian, OE, Lofty and others?

[srca1941]

On my desktop I have a "Comics" folder. Within that is "Comic Book Scans," where I keep the folders of the books I've recently scanned/am scanning. Within that is my "Downloaded" folder where all downloaded books are unzipped and sorted simply by title/issue number. For the most part, I know who published what, so separating them that way that isn't a big concern. When I need to clear hard drive space, I back things from "Comic Book Scans" and "Downloaded" up to DVD, and keep track of DVD contents on an Excel spreadsheet. (And I need to start doing DVD backups to safeguard against file corruption. It's not a really big deal for downloads because of DCM and GAC, but I'd hate to lose my 300dpi master files of the books I've scanned myself.) I've thought about combining titles and publishers, but as many still have holes, or need paper fills to replace the fiche, it really isn't practical.

The only publisher I keep like that is MLJ since it's more or less complete, and it's a great tool for art identification. So many GA creators came through that publisher at one point or another, and often signed their work there. When I'm trying to ID an artist I'm unfamiliar with, the first thing I look for is anything they might have done for MLJ, and then check that against the work I'm trying to ID.

-Eric

[Kevin Yong]

I'll probably end up with some variation of Publisher/Title subfolders, and then I'll have to figure out a file naming structure that I can apply consistently. Thanks for all the examples, everyone!

-- Kevin

[Bob Hughes]

I'm pretty radical. I strip out all the cbr/cbg stuff and just save the jpeg which I rename into a standard format so that all issues flow in order and then I file them by publisher and title, usually burning them to a dvd once the file is complete/gets too big.

[bchat]

For files I download, I simply sort them into publisher folders (within a folder marked "Comic Files"), with an "Other" folder for small publishers, publishers I don't download many files for and oddball books.  Some files I'll "rename" so that it's Title - Volume (if needed to organizde a title's run) - Issue # - Publication Date (sometimes, if it's important for me to make note of it).  For books I scan myself, they all get dumped into one folder, with the original scans getting placed in their own group of folders.

For a while now, after I've downloaded a file, I've gone through and saved (or "copied-out") various stories and placed them into another group of folders, organized by Year, then Month/Season and finally into their own seperate Character/Feature folders.  I just find it interesting to see "the big picture" of what all the publishers were doing through the years as a group.

[Poztron]

I have a folder on an external hard-drive named Old Comics within which I have folders by Publisher. Within those folders I have folders by comic title. And within those comic folders I have the files renamed to something on this order:

Christmas Carnival #2 (StJ) Geller-Flip-Nordling-Story-Berg.cbz

Sometimes I skip the publisher in parentheses, but as much as possible I like to ID the artists in the book, because that's what I like to see at a glance. I generally ID as much as I can from signed stories and go to GCD for the rest (when they are indexed there). I don't bother with the date because I can see that easily if I open the file. The trickiest part has been seeking out scans for a specific comic if I can't recall who the publisher was. But a quick search at GCD usually solves that, too.

I think everyone organizes them according to their own priorities. (I also have a sort of holding tank folder called Unread Comics, where I tend to first put files before IDing art and renaming the files. At the moment that has 264 files in it.)

[narfstar]

Poz if you are IDing art or find anything not on GCD please go there and contribute that information. I do not know if you have ever tried indexing a book before the new system or after. With the current system you can do as little or as much as you like. If you would just go in and put the story title, page count and artist it would be providing the information for others like you get from it.

[Poztron]

Poz if you are IDing art or find anything not on GCD please go there and contribute that information. I do not know if you have ever tried indexing a book before the new system or after. With the current system you can do as little or as much as you like. If you would just go in and put the story title, page count and artist it would be providing the information for others like you get from it.

Good point, narfy, and I ought to do that. I did try under the old GCD system but got intimidated or confused. So, I mostly sent in corrections by email or some correction link. I owe it to myself to see how it can be handled with the new system. Now just to find the time!

[roberto]

I put the digital files under publisher title in general. I rename the stuff to put in sequential order the files to easily see the stuff.
And , since i like some semblance of physical stuff (and to keep a back up , i put similar stuff in DVD  , and create a cover for it (i use the nero cover designer to create the ocver and the results are good).

[ThW]

Quite simple: There is a map for the fresh downloads. And a storage map, containing "00-Theme" maps, so jungle, superheroes western, SF comics and the like can be placed together if they are not belonging in one of the publisher maps. The Publisher maps contain a number of series maps. (If there is just one series-map from a publisher it goes in one of the 00-theme maps, unless I expect to add others relatively soon, if it's hard to place thematically it goes  in 00-other), If the series has been published by more than one publisher it goes in MultiPublisher map.