Collections

A collection is a named, (optionally) ordered set of images: a comic told in loose pages, a photoset, an artist’s series. It is a lighter grouping than a relation - no original, no direction, just membership and an order. An image can belong to several collections at once, with its own position in each.

On the detail page, images from the same collection render in a “Same collection” strip, so you can read through a set in order.

Filing images#

File an image from the Collections row on its detail page: the name autocompletes against existing collections, and a new name creates one. To file or unfile many images at once, use Set collection in the gallery’s Actions chooser (whole current search) or the batch bar (selection).

The Collections page#

The Collections page lists every collection with its member count. From there you can:

• Rename a collection across all its members. Renaming onto a name that already exists merges the two: the incoming members keep their order and land after the target’s last page, so neither reading order is scrambled.
• Reorder members. In the reorder dialog, clicking a tile’s filename also renames that file on the spot: type the new name and press Enter (Escape cancels).
• Dissolve a collection: the images stay, the grouping goes.
• Toggle find relations per collection. By default the near-duplicate pair finder skips pairs that share a collection (the collection already relates them); the switch opts a collection back in. See Relations.

Searching and sorting#

collection:"name" finds a collection’s members, collection: images in no collection, collection:any images in at least one. The Collection order sort groups results by collection and reads each one in its own order; when the search pins a single collection:, results follow exactly that collection’s order. Details in Searching.

Turning a collection into an archive#

[generate cbz] on the Collections page packs a collection into a new cbz archive, useful when a set was downloaded as loose images but reads as one book.

Pages follow the collection’s own order, falling back to filename order for members that are not numbered. The archive gets a ComicInfo.xml with the collection’s name and page count, lands in your upload folder, and shows up in the gallery as an ordinary cbz you can read.

A collection holding a video, an animated image or another archive cannot be packed, since those have no page a reader could show.

Nothing is taken away here either: the collection and its images stay as they are, and their tags are not copied onto the archive. Packing the same collection twice does not make a second copy: monbooru notices the result is identical and keeps the one it already has.

Unpacking an archive back into a collection is in Manga and comic archives.