Book/Comics sorting

[Duvel]

Currently there's no way to sort books or comics that are part of the same serie, in the correct order.
Even if your books and comics embed correct metadata and even if your files are correctly named with the issue number.
This is a deal-breaker for most large comics  libraries. When you have  series with dozen/hundred of issues, the UI just become so much unpractical that it is simply unusable, and you continue to use Komga or Kavita mostly for that reason.

A simple fix would be to add a default sort option based on the filename.
But ideally the bookshelf plugin should be improved to store more information about books and comics, and the UI should take profit of it.

This features have been asked several times :
https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/1062...s-metadata
https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/2407...e-metadata
https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/2481...lugin-side
https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/2585...lder-names

[TheDreadPirate]

There is a "Sort Title" you can provide to override how books/movies/shows/music is sorted by the actual title.  It can be literally anything to achieve the sorting you want.

   

[Duvel]

ok but how are we supposed to do this on a collections of > 5000 comics ??? Nobody does that.

ALL my comics are in CBZ format, managed with either Calibre or ComicRack and each of those CBZ contains a proper ComicInfo.xml
Its the job of Jellyfin to parse this the way it should and to populate its metadata correctly with XML info....

Code:

<ComicInfo xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<Title>L'enfer en retour</Title>
<Series>Sin City</Series>
<Number>7.0</Number>
<Summary>Ancien Navy Seal, Wallace gagne maintenant sa vie comme dessinateur de presse. Un soir, alors qu’il se balade seul en bord de mer, il aperçoit une jeune fille se jeter du haut d’une falaise. Sans hésiter, il plonge à son tour, parvient à la sortir de l’eau et la sauver. Entre Wallace et Esther, c’est le nom de le jeune fille, nait d’emblée une forte sympathie qui ne tarde pas à se transformer en attirance réciproque ; ensemble, ils sont heureux et décident d’aller boire un verre dans un bar : Wallace raconte son passé militaire et Esther les débuts de sa carrière d’actrice. Mais, lors qu’il est sur le point d’embrasser Esther, Wallace perd connaissance. À son réveil, il comprend d’avoir été drogué. Esther a disparu et Wallace décide de la retrouver à tout prix… </Summary>
<Year>1999</Year>
<Month>1</Month>
<Day>1</Day>
<Writer>Frank Miller</Writer>
<Publisher>Rackham</Publisher>
<Tags>Crime, Comics, Mystery, Thriller, _réimporté_</Tags>
<LanguageISO>fr</LanguageISO>
</ComicInfo>

See that <number> thing on  3rd line?
Jellyfin does NOTHING with it.
Which is a deal-breaker for a LARGE comic collection as I said.

We dont do manual metadata edition on properly organized massive library, in case you wouldn't know.

volume/issue numbering is a fundamental element of a comic serie and any software that manage that kind of media has to deal with it properly.
The fact that you ignore it, while it has been reported multiple times in the features requests, demonstrates that Jellyfin isn't ready at all for Comics despite the recent efforts the team has put into it.

[TheDreadPirate]

Jellyfin has the <sorttitle> tag. You could probably write a script to automate the creation of a sorttitle field based on the series, number, etc., fields.

[Iskelderon]

True, better handling of comics detection is still a niche where JF has a lot of room for improvements. I've lost count of the times I had to manually use "identify"o set the Comic Vine ID. The detection algorithm for videos seems worlds more robust.

[shawncp]

Shameless plug here but I have created a script that exports and restructures a Calibre library for presentation via Jellyfin that may be of use. I myself do not have a comics library but thanks to contributor Cudail, support for comics was added. It does depend on metadata present in the Calibre .opf file. It embeds series index into book folder names and the metadata file so that items sort and display in series order.

https://github.com/shawn61cp/calibre2jellyfin

[flymetothemoon]

Jellyfin has the <sorttitle> tag.  You could probably write a script to automate the creation of a sorttitle field based on the series, number, etc., fields.

Sorry for necro! But does this mean that if I can add the tag "sorttitle" to book/comic/manga/audiobook (or like whatever I have on jellyfin server) and then make it automatically be the same value as file name that would kinda fix the issues with sorting files? Especially with comics? It would be tedious to go through 1000 comic books and manually put a sort title.

Like I am using comicrack with comicvine tag so if I can add another field with "sorttitle" that matches the file name and make the program put that it would help with sorting the comics in jellyfin?

[TheDreadPirate]

I don't have a comic/e-book library, but this seems to be what the solution is.

The OP was using NFOs for metadata. So, in their case, they would add an additional XML field with the tab <sorttitle>.

I'm not sure if that would also translate well to a tag, like you've described. But can't hurt to try.

[flymetothemoon]

So what I ended up doing for comics was not getting metadata for titles of comics (they are shown with "series + series number" as name), for books just the basic metadata like book name author, description. It seems okay now within Jellyfin and things are kinda sorted well automatically.