I’ve been searching around for a way to organize my TTRPG collection of pdfs (numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands) and haven’t really found a silver bullet for it yet. Everything I’ve looked at has some sort of weird thing that’s off about it that doesn’t seem to make it ideal. Is there something out there that others are using that works well? Here’s what I’ve looked at so far:

• Folder system: This is what I’m already using and it’s serviceable (PC), but it really doesn’t give me any tagging function and so it’s hard to organize based on genre or come up with really any categories outside of just alphabetically naming folders based on the RPG name, then putting whatever subcategories I need as folders below that. It just feels so clunky going about it like this. Being able to organize/search via tags just seems like the way to go.

• Calibre: This gets recommended everytime, but honestly I’m not interested in duplicating my library of +10,000 pdfs and following their organization system. The desktop app looks ugly (which is apparently fixed with Calibre-web but still requires the desktop app).

• Jellyfin: Really not geared towards books in general, it’s functional but not great for it. This may end up being what I fall back to if I can’t get anything else working.

• Kavita: Looks nice and works nice EXCEPT it has some weird ass naming convention with regards to numbers in the folder/file names. Only top-level stuff can contain numbers, everything below has to have roman numerals? Such a weird thing that just breaks it for me.

• Komga: It looks nice and works nice, but is more geared towards comics, and thus doesn’t work so hot with RPGs with multiple categories (Core rulebooks, Scenarios, Settings, etc), since I tend to break those out into different folders. It ends up treating sub-folders as a different series altogether, so it sort of demands that you just keep everything in the same folder.

• Ubooquity: Tried it, it ran like ass on my machine and didn’t seem to do as good a job. Making updates in the folders themselves took awhile to propagate and it just overall didn’t seem to work well for how I wanted to use it. I just didn’t particularly care for it.

• Zotero: It’s actually more meant for academic journals and such, but it could be used for organizing TTRPG pdfs, though not sure how well it scales up once you start throwing thousands of pdfs at it. Downside though is that it’s not as flashy as some of the others, it doesn’t display book covers and you have to create additional objects for each item. You also can’t just add tags to the PDFs themselves, you have to create an additional ‘Book’ object and attach the pdf to that item, then add whatever tags/notes/metadata you want to add. I haven’t figured out how to automate the process and the one item I tried where it automatically found it, it created a ‘Journal Article’ and renamed it based on the authors of the book (which it did correctly find), which is not ideal for going through thousands of items. I just want it to keep the file names in most cases as I’ve already gotten most file names where I want them.