Search but can't find

Panels
#1

This came up today. I was importing a comic to a preexisting collection and while scrolling through the list to find the title, I accidentally touched a passing title and it imported the comic to who-knows where because it happened so fast I don’t know what I accidentally touched. When one does not know the location of something, one uses the search, right? Predictably it found the title, but the only thing I can do from a search result page is open a comic. I can’t see where it lives from a search page - which is a problem because what I’m looking for is: where did it land? I could find no way of learning this. I even tried being a smart-guy and opening the comic, paging to the end to see what the next comic in the collection would be. Nope. When opened from a search, there is no “continue” functions at the very end of a comic. It’s not the first time this has happened. Perhaps touching and holding for 2 or 3 seconds on cover art in the search result could bring up a means to go to that collection and if the title resides in more than one collection, simply provide a menu of them. -Joe

1 Like
#2

Search really needs a lot of work. There are things I can do in other apps that I really want to do in Panels:

  • I want “breadcrumbs” or some indicator of what “folder” or “tag” has been applied, where is my comic? I want to know which comics are in a collection and which aren’t. (see bug at bottom about possible “orphans”)

  • I want to do “file operations” on a list of comics. I want be able to add or remove them from a collection or collect the list into another collection for reading and deletion. I even want to be able to delete them FROM the search list.

  • I also want some “magic operators” like “read in the last week” or “done” --because if they’re done I want to be able to search for them and delete. I also want a list of “orphans” … because I may have found a bug?

In current search, where I can only open found comics and do nothing else, I have a couple comics that I can find in search but are in NO COLLECTION and do not seem to be “loose in the Library.” This occurs in 1.12.3 and is 2 comics out of … about 1200.

So I want another “magic search operator” for “Orphaned Files” in addition to “Read within X days/weeks” so that I can (with the organizing w/in search feature) to associate these files (back?) into a collection.

I think everyone is running into this problem of having too many comics, not knowing that was read, wanting to tag and (re)organize comics, and knowing what they have and what they don’t. And I think (a beefed up) Search is the way to deal with this.

The fact that there’s a search, but that I can’t do basic file operations like moving or deleting a comic from search is what kind of irks me. --Leo

[Feature Request] "Magic Search" variables (based on metadata)
#3

Hello @joecunningham and @Leoofborg
First, thank you both for your detailed feedback and for being so active on the forum. We take your comments very seriously (sorry that sometimes it takes us a while to answer).

As you may know, we are currently working on Panels 2.0. The main changes for this version will be related to the library. One of the big changes will be a dedicated tab for search. Right now, search is super basic and can only open comics. I can’t assure that all features that we would like to add to search will be present in Panels 2.0, but we will definitely be improving it over time. We are putting a huge amount of work to this new version but we need to leave some features out (otherwise we will never ship it :joy: )