Hi, first I’d like to say I’m loving the app, great interface and lots of features. I’ve taken the one-off subscription and am migrating all of my comics over to Panels, so great work! I have a couple of questions / possible feature requests and one issue, but first I wanted to explain how I’m using the app in case there’s a better way of doing things.
I have quite a large library of comics (around 1200) stored on iCloud Drive in a Comics folder which I map as the library. From there they are organised into folders by publisher, then by series / character and possibly another level of folders if a character has a lot of series’. An example might be: 2000AD > Judge Dredd > Complete Case Files. I store the files in iCloud and only download them onto my device when I want to read them.
My questions are:
Is it possible to download all comics in a folder in one go?
Is there a way to filter an iCloud library to only show the comics downloaded onto the device?
Is there a way to roll-up the read icon on a comic to the folder level once I’ve read all of the comics in the folder?
Is there a way to add a custom thumbnail to a comic?
Finally, I’ve had an issue a couple of times where the library will carry out a full reindex and lose all of the thumbnails it’s already created, rebuilding them from scratch again. This takes an extremely long time (currently running for six hours and roughly a quarter done on an iPad Pro 3rd gen), I assume this is because the files aren’t downloaded onto the device so Panels has to retrieve them from iCloud first to read them. Is there a way to stop this from happening?
Hi @RunDMP. Thank you for your kind words. Also, sorry for the late reply.
To answer your questions:
Is it possible to download all comics in a folder in one go?
You can do the following: On the top-right menu, tap “Select”. When you are in Select mode, you will see a new “Select all” button at the top left corner. There is a download button on the bottom toolbar. (square with an arrow pointing downwards). You can also open the contextual menu at the bottom right corner and tap Download.
We haven’t added the option to select a folder and download everything inside it because it is not guaranteed that everything inside it is already indexed, but we might add it in the future.
Is there a way to add a custom thumbnail to a comic?
Not at the moment. We are considering allowing you to select a specific page as the cover in the library, in case the comic has multiple covers. But, for now, we don’t think we’ll add the option to select any random image because we have to store that image somewhere, and files can be moved around, removed, and renamed… not only in Panels but from another app like Files.app. It’s a lot of complexity for a niche feature that can easily worked around if users update their comic files to have the cover they want.
About your final comment. That’s weird. Have you been moving files around outside Panels? That would invalidate the index, the metadata and the thumbnails. Panels has to download the file to calculate the metadata (number of pages, file hash, etc…) and generate the thumbnail to store it on iCloud. That should only happen once.
I plan to add logs to the library index and store them in disk so users can share them with us in case of an issue, and debug what triggered the re-index.
Thanks for the comprehensive response and answering all of my questions dani, that should give me everything I need. I think the filter for downloaded comics would be helpful for quickly finding something to read on the go but I appreciate not everyone may use Panels the same way I do.
Regarding the indexing issue, I haven’t been moving files around, only adding stuff but I’ll keep an eye on it and if it happens again I’ll make a note of anything I was doing at the time.
Also, from reading the thread you linked, I hadn’t realised you’re only two developers working on Panels so again I appreciate all of the great work you’ve done so far, it’s quite the achievement!
Yep. we are only two, working on Panels in our spare time
I think the filter for downloaded comics would be helpful for quickly finding something to read on the go but I appreciate not everyone may use Panels the same way I do.
Definitely! We are thinking about ways to improve this use case.
Let us know if there’s anything else we can help with.
and one issue, but first I wanted to explain how I’m using the app in case there’s a better way of doing things.
