Libraries

There are a couple key concepts to go over regarding how Stump represents libraries:

• Libraries are really just paths on your computer that contain subdirectories representing series of books.
• A library paths must be recursively unique. This means if you have a library at /books, you cannot have a library at /books/comics.

As long as a directory is accessible by Stump, and abides by the above specification, you can create a library with it. This allows for convenient configurations like network drives, etc.

Supported Patterns

There are way too many varying organizational preferences for Stump to support all of them. Instead, Stump supports two different patterns for organizing your library:

• Collection-Priority: Takes the top most folders and collapses their contents into it as a single series.
• Series-Priority: Will create a separate series for each folder that directly contains media files, not just the top most folder.

Collection-Priority

A collection-priority library is useful for libraries that have many nested folders that you’d like to be grouped by the top most folder. Only direct descendants of the library root will be considered for series creation, so long as they contain media files at some point in their hierarchy.

Series-Priority

A series-priority library is useful for libraries which should be grouped by any directory that directly contains media files. Any descendant directories (including the library root itself) will be considered for series creation, so long as they directly contain media files.

Examples

A few examples to help illustrate the difference between the two library patterns and how Stump will interpret their differing structures.

Example 1

Consider the following file tree:

When Stump scans this library as a collection-priority library, it will create 3 series:

1. Shannon, Samantha
2. Sanderson, Brandon
3. J.R.R. Tolkien.

When Stump scans this library as a series-priority library, it will create 4 series:

1. Shannon, Samantha
2. Sanderson, Brandon
3. Mistborn
4. The Lord of the Rings.

Below is a visualization of this library in Stump, using a file tree for simplicity:

Example 2

Consider the following file tree:

When Stump scans this library as a series-priority library, it will create 2 series:

1. Daredevil
2. The Amazing Spider-Man (2018).

In this particular case, a collection-priority library would produce the same result, as there are no nested folders. The representation is also identical to the file tree, above!

Complicated Example

Let’s consider the following file tree:

Notice how I started mixing stand alone novels and book series, grouping the book series by folders, for each author.

When Stump scans this library as a collection-priority library, it will create 3 series:

1. Martin, George R R
2. Sanderson, Brandon
3. Tolkien, J R R.

When Stump scans this library as a series-priority library, it will create 7 series:

1. A Song of Ice and Fire
2. Sanderson, Brandon
3. Mistborn
4. The Mistborn (Era 1)
5. The Mistborn (Era 2)
6. Tolkien, J R R
7. The Lord of the Rings.

Below is a visualization of this library in Stump, using a file tree for simplicity:

Choosing a Pattern

There is no right and wrong when it comes to configuring a library as either collection-priority or series-priority. It’s all about preference.

In general, if you plan on having nested folders in your library that can be grouped by the upper most level, then you should use a collection-priority library. If your library is flat, or you don’t want to group books by the upper most level, then you should use a series-priority library.

Personally, I use a collection-priority library for my ebooks and a series-priority library for my comics. I find that the collection-priority library works well for ebooks, as I can group them all by author, regardless of how I organize the underlying filesystem, and the series-priority library works well for comics, as I can group them by major arcs.

Alternative Options

Unfortunately, Stump does not support any other patterns, as there are simply too many ways to organize a library to support them all. If you have a library that doesn’t quite fit either of these patterns, or you just prefer a different organization method, you can always use the File Explorer to navigate your library. This is akin to using a native file explorer to navigate your filesystem.

Optional Processing

You can adjust the behavior of the scanner per-library by enabling or disabling certain processing options. These options are available in the library settings page (/settings/scanning).

To learn more about these options, see the scanner guide.

How-to Guides

Create a Library

The process for creating a library is broken up into a few steps:

Edit a Library

You can edit a library by navigating to the library’s settings page. From there, the settings are broken up into separate tabs for each major category. There are a lot of form elements which are shared between the library creation and editing processes, so the process should be familiar. The sections which are unique to library editing are:

Analysis

There are more resource-intensive analysis operations which can be done on a library. At the moment, the only option is Analyze books.

Analyze books

A book analysis does the following:

• Calculate the exact number of pages in a page-based book (e.g., CBZs). This will update any incorrect metadata in the database
• Calculate the dimensions for each page in a page-based book. This is used for integrations which benefit and/or require page data

Access Control

You can explicitly exclude users from seeing a library. This is useful for hiding libraries that contain content that a user should not see, such as age-restricted content or content you don’t want them to access.

For more information, see the library exclusions guide.

Deletion

For deleting a library, see the delete a library section.

• Clean library - Remove any books or series which cannot be located on disk. This is useful for cleaning up the database after moving or deleting files.

Delete a Library

Deleting a library will remove all of the series, books, and other entities associated with the books (e.g., read progress, reading lists, etc) contained within it. Your actual files will not be deleted, but they will no longer exist in Stump.

This action cannot be undone.

You can delete a library from the library selection menu on the sidebar, or by navigating to the library’s deletion settings page (/settings/delete).