cataloging my game collection
creating metadata for a collection of games
2025-01-30
creating metadata for a collection of games
2025-01-30
I have been collecting ttrpgs for a lot of years now.
At first they were all just in my Downloads folder all willy-nilly with no thought or effort given toward organizing them at all.
Eventually I moved them from my Downloads folder into a
rpgs folder in Documents, where I maintained a directory
heirarchy based on system.
And finally I imported all of them into a calibre library so that I have my rpg library along side my ebook library. This has been convenient because I have a 4TB external hard drive hooked up to a raspberry pi in my office running calibre-server. So everytime I binge and download a dozen new games from itch.io I upload them to the web ui and they are added to my collection. I either read the games right away, or I read them later at my leisure on my laptop or ipad or any other networked device in my house that can read a pdf.
But then comes the laborious part: cataloging them.
Almost NOBODY adds metadata to their final pdf files.
When they are imported into calibre, I’m lucky to get “Unknown” as the author. And I’m often just as likely to get an author’s itch store name as I am to get their actual name. So I have to remember to associate names with each other and cross reference them, or I have to arbitrarily choose one over the other and then change all instances of the of the other name to the one I picked.
For a title, I’m likely to get something like “instructions-2024-0a.pdf” or “draft” or “White and Black Minimalist Simple Page Border” or “PowerPoint Presentation.”
If I’m unlucky, then the author used a starting template or document as the base for their game, and the final product has somebody else’s name on it: the name of the template author. And I have to just notice that the name in the metadata doesn’t match the name in the document.
I don’t know where they come from, but sometimes the “tags” field contains random gibberish, or a lengthy description of the document, or some other nonesense. Sometimes tags include “tabletop” or “ttrpg,” which is useless noise.
It’s all very chaotic!
If you take nothing else from this post, please please update the metadata fields in whatever it is you use to export your final document!
I get it. It’s hard to remember sometimes. This is a soapbox of mine, and yet even I myself sometimes forget to do it myself.
I personally don’t consistantly use any one tool to create my pdfs.
Sometimes it’s groff, othertimes it’s markdown + pandoc, or google docs
+ download as pdf, or scribus, or inkscape. So I use
exiftool as a post-processing step, which I installed on my
macbook with brew install exiftool. It is a bit of a swiss
army knife for exif data. I can then add the metadata with a quick
little oneliner:
exiftool \
-Author=dozens \
-Title="The Haunting of Floating Cow Ranch" \
-Keyword=module \
-Keyword=risus \
-Keyword="wiked grin" \
-CreationDate="2022-10-20" \
export.pdfThis section is the real reason I’m writing this post. It’s a way for me to brain dump a sort of schema that I want for my collection. A way for me to imagine the metadata that I want to see when I open up my collection and start to search through it.
There are currently 2,180 items in my rpg library. And nearly all of them have metadata that requires cleaning up on import.
At bare minimum, I must have a correct Author and Title for each. Optionally, I will also have a link or description for where the item came from.
Then there are the tags.
Tags are where I try to create a schema for everything else.
Type:
Game: troika, pbta, shadowdark, shadowrun, etc, etc
Dice:
Players:
Prep:
Materials:
Production Level:
Format:
Genre: comedy, zombies, pirates, vampires, scifi, space, solarpunk, cyberpunk, urban fantasy, mythology, meta, lovecraft, mystery, superheroes, victorian, etc
Series:
This is a ridiculous overuse of tags. I wonder if I can just add custom fields to a calibre collection. But these are the kinds of things that I want to be able to click around and sort/search by in my collection.