Some weeks ago I saw that Panels has now OPDS support and was instantly interested in it. So I looked around and deployed a Komga Container to sync (via rclone) all my stuff up to it (worked like a charm).
Panels accepted the OPDS feed without an issue (okay it tried default port 8080 first, but I put Komga behind a proxy, so had to change back to 80 again).
What I realized now, while reading via OPDS:
Next chapter doesn’t work
Every time when I reach the end of the current chapter, I have to go back to the Library and select the next chapter by hand.
Downloaded collections doesn’t show up locally
Next to stream, we’re also able to download our collections. This works well, but it would be nice if the downloaded collections also show up locally.
Feature-Request/Idea
Pin/Favourite OPDS Folder Now, working the first time with OPDS, I see that the serving application (komga) decides how to deliver all information. It would be nice if we’re able to hold an folder-item and select favourite to put this for quicker access into the sidebar. Ahh, you already working on that. Nice!
as I said in the other thread, yep. we are still working on the external libraries so they have the same features as the device one.
Next chapter doesn’t work
We are working on this. It’s not as easy as it might look because external libraries might cease to exist (because you lose the connection to it) and also the next issue might not be in the library anymore (if you delete it on the server-side). Solving that problem is not technically trivial, and we decided to skip that feature for now. On the device is much easier to calculate because we have more control over the files and where they are.
We are working on a solution though.
Downloaded collections doesn’t show up locally
This one is not a bug or a missing feature is more of a conscious product decision. If you want those files to appear on your device library you can “Copy to my [device]”. That would bring the import interface up and you’ll be able to use it as a regular import picker.
But downloading a comic from an external library simply caches the file locally for local access, but they won’t appear in the device library. This is because it’s impossible to predict the server organization and make it match your local library. If you download a comic, where should it appear in your local library? Also, servers have multiple navigation paths to reach the same content. Komga for instance could show “All Series > Spider-Man” but also “All publishers > Marvel > Spider-Man”, or “All Libraries > Comics > Spider-Man”. What folder structure should be replicated in your library? What happens if you already have a collection with the same name? Should we add them to it? create a separate one with a different name?
There are too many unknowns and decisions to make on your behalf so we decided to leave that decision to the user.
We are also considering users that want to use their OPDS server as their main library and ignore the local library completely. Or keep them separated whatever the reason.
So yeah… even though we considered that option. We thought that it would be better to keep them as it is now. External libraries navigations are cached locally. So, even if you don’t have an internet connection, you should be able to navigate through your server on previously visited paths. Also, you can create favorites to external locations.
Okay, in short the current main focus is to improve the local organization, user-experience and import-features first and when everything is solid, things like external source/storage integration could become more enhanced.
Until then we (the users) should see OPDS as import-source from where we can easier import our collections, right?