How to organize your digital manga with AniList metadata

On a shelf, manga spines line up with the artwork and the author's name on each one.

A digital collection usually looks more like this: /Manga/One_Piece/Ch_1000/[Translators_Name]_OP_v100_HQ.zip.

Send files like that to a Kindle or Kobo and the library screen fills with grey "DOC" icons, cryptic titles and no authors, so finding a volume to re-read means decoding file names.

Here's how to turn that folder into a library you can find things in.

1. Why metadata matters

E-readers mostly ignore the name of the file (e.g., naruto_01.epub). They read the metadata, the information stored inside the file.

For a library you can browse on a Kindle or Kobo, your files need:

1. Title: e.g., "Naruto, Vol. 1"
2. Series Name & Index: Used to group books into "Collections".
3. Author/Artist: Used for filtering and searching.
4. Synopsis: The back-of-the-book description.
5. Cover Art: A high-resolution .jpg set as the cover inside the file.

2. Tagging by hand in Calibre

For casual readers, Calibre is the go-to tool.

A raw .cbz archive often has no metadata at all. It's a zip file of pictures. To fix this using Calibre:

1. Import the .cbz.
2. Right-click and choose Edit Metadata.
3. Manually type in the Author and Series name.
4. Go to Google Images, find a clean, text-free volume cover, download it, and upload it into Calibre.
5. Use a plugin to copy that cover into the zip file.
6. Convert it to an EPUB so the metadata is locked in.

That takes about 2 to 3 minutes per volume, so a library of 1,000 volumes means dozens of hours of data entry. Calibre's Download metadata button can fill in some fields from online sources, but manga volumes often still need checking by hand.

3. AniList names and MangaSendr

You don't have to type every field by hand to get a tidy Kindle library. Two things do most of the work: a clean file name and a cover that comes first in the file.

The best-known crowdsourced manga database is AniList. Use it as your naming reference. Look up the series, copy the official English title, and rename your files to match, for example Chainsaw Man v01.cbz instead of [Group]_Chainsaw_Man_01_HQ.cbz.

Then send the file with MangaSendr:

1. Title from the file name: MangaSendr writes the file name into the EPUB as the book's title, so a clean file name becomes a clean title in your Kindle library.
2. Cover from the first page: The first image in the file becomes the cover. If your archive's first image isn't the cover, rename the images so the cover sorts first before you upload.
3. Packaged as an EPUB: MangaSendr builds a fixed-layout EPUB sized for your Kindle model and emails it to your Kindle, where most files arrive within a few minutes.

Web uploads don't fetch anything from AniList. There's no automatic author, genre, or synopsis lookup, and the cover is never downloaded from the internet. If you use the desktop app, its watched-folder library does look each series up on AniList, so your library inside the app is labeled by series.

Reading progress is still manual

MangaSendr doesn't connect to your AniList account and doesn't update your reading progress there. If you track what you read on AniList, you'll still log chapters yourself.

The naming only has to happen once per file, and a tidy folder of well-named volumes is easier to manage on your computer too, whichever e-reader you send it to.

Your first delivery is free. Pricing covers what's included after that.