Import your back catalogue

1What this is for

This is the bulk path, for bringing an existing body of work in at once. If you just want to make or upload one new thing, that is New asset, covered elsewhere. The Import tab is the opposite: point it at the folder your work is already in, and it plans out every asset inside, uploads the files straight from your machine, and lets you check and fix the whole batch before it creates anything. The promise on the tab says it plainly: bring a whole back catalogue in at once, and get a review before any of it becomes part of the studio.

2Open the Import tab

Go to your Studio and open the Import tab. It appears for anyone who can manage the studio (owner, admin, or an editor). You get two ways in: Choose a folder (drag it in or click to browse, and its sub-folders become separate assets) or Choose a zip (one archive of the whole catalogue, unpacked right in your browser). Pick whichever matches how your work is already organised on disk.

3How it reads your files

The importer groups per folder, and the rule is simple. A folder with two or more images becomes one comic, with the first image as the cover and the rest as pages in order. A folder (or spot) with a single image becomes one art piece. Each video or audio file becomes its own asset. So the shape of your folders is the shape of your catalogue: one sub-folder per issue, and you get one comic per issue.

• A folder of pages (2+ images) becomes a comic; first image is the cover.
• A lone image becomes an art asset.
• Each video or audio file becomes its own asset (video, or a podcast).
• Titles come from the folder or file name, so name your folders like you want your assets named.

4What it takes (and what it does not)

The importer works from raw media: images (PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, AVIF, TIFF), video (MP4, WebM, MOV), and audio (MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG, AAC), plus the caption and description sidecars. It is not a comic-archive reader: there is no PDF or CBZ path here, so a catalogue that only exists as flattened PDFs needs its pages as images first. If your work is loose page images and media files, you are exactly who this is built for.

5The upload

Once you pick your folder, the importer plans it (telling you how many assets it found and how many loose files it will skip) and starts uploading. The files go straight from your browser to storage, not through a middleman, which is how it handles a very large catalogue. You will see it work through phases: working out what the folder contains, registering the assets, then uploading. Keep the tab open until it finishes.

6The review, before anything exists

When the upload finishes you land on the batch's review page, and this is the heart of the feature: no assets exist yet. You see every planned item with its kind, its source path, its files and a description, and you sort them out before committing. Every item needs a project to belong to; the quickest way is Use the folder names (which assigns projects from your top folders at once) or Put the rest in a project you pick. You can Edit any item to fix its title, kind, description or project, and Remove one you do not want (with Put back to undo). When it looks right, hit Create these assets.

7What you get, and finishing it

Committing mints your assets, in slices, into their projects. They arrive as private drafts, in private projects if you made new ones: no access type, no price, not published, not eligible for anything. That is deliberate. The import gets your work into the studio accurately; turning it into published, priced, discoverable work is the normal per-asset job you already know, so from here you open each asset, set it up, and publish when it is ready.

8Limits and honest edges

A single batch holds a lot (thousands of assets and tens of thousands of files); if your catalogue is bigger than one batch, it tells you to split the folder and import in parts. A couple of behaviours matter here, so nothing surprises you.

• Remove is not delete. Removing an item retracts it (it will not become an asset) but the upload is kept while platform staff review removals, then cleared. You can put it back until then.
• An incomplete item will not commit. A comic missing a page is refused rather than created with holes; fix the files and re-import that piece.
• One bad file fails only its own item. An unreadable file stops just that asset, with the reason on the row; the rest still commit.
• Items with no project are skipped, not lost. Commit tells you how many still need a project chosen so you can finish them.

9The other import: whole-asset packages

There is a second, different import worth naming so you do not confuse the two. On a single asset you can Export package, and on a project's Assets tab there is an Import button that takes either a folder or a single exported asset package file. That is a faithful, whole-asset transfer (it carries the asset's structure between studios), and it is an Enterprise capability, so it is gated: without Enterprise or a comped switch, it shows an upgrade note instead. Imported packages also land as drafts.

Questions creators actually ask