This page will describe how to import comics into your library.

ComiXed does not automatically search for new files to add to its library. Instead, it needs to be told explicitly what comics it should manage. This is done for both performance reasons (it takes a lot of resources to monitor changes to a directory structure), and for practical reasons (constantly adding entries to or removing entries from the database isn't very efficient), and for security reasons (a bad file could potentially compromise your server if an exploit is discovered).

So the decision was made early on to require administrators to import comics into their library.

To start the import process, select the Import Comics entry from the side navigation page. This will open the Comic Import page. Then enter the root directory where comics to be imported are located. This can be any directory that can be accessed by the computer running ComiXed, including a local hard drive, a NAS device, your Google drive, etc.

If you are using the Docker container, then you'll want to use the directory you specified as comic_dir.

On Linux, MacOS and similar *nix machines, directories are specified using forward slashes (/). For Windows machines, you must replace all backslashes (\) with forward slashes (/). So, for example, if you're importing comics from:

C:\users\reader\Documents\comics\incoming

then you would enter the following into the source directory:

C:/users/reader/Documents/comics/incoming

Since loading a lot of comics can be a time consuming process, there is an option to limit the number of results returned. You can limit the number to 10, 50, 100, or 1000 comics by selecting the appropriate entry from the dropdown next to the directory input.

By default, it will retrieve all comics, which can take a long time.

Only comics not currently in the library are returned. ComiXed won't let you re-import a comic.

When the results returned, none are selected by default. You can select individual comics by ticking the checkbox next to it, or you can select all comics by ticking the top-most checkbox.

Once you have a least one comic selected, the Import button is enabled.

Simply click the Import button in the toolbar to begin the import process. It will tell the server to begin processing only those comics you've selected.

Only one batch of comics can be imported at a time. So while the ones selected are being imported, you will not be able to browse for more comics or start another import process.

The import process is durable and can survive a reboot of the server. It will pick up where it left off and continue until it completes.