What is it?

Demyo is a software to manage comic collections.

Add content, and browse freely through your series, albums, authors, derivatives, ...
Tag albums to sort them into multiple categories
Add images to your collection: covers, extracts, author portraits, ...
Demyo is available for Windows and Linux
... and even better: it is totally free.

Want to know more? Read below, see more screenshots or try it yourself.

Why was this started?

Demyo is a browser-based collection manager aimed at comics, graphical novels, and mostly anything that is in a "drawing and speech bubbles" fashion (mangas, graphical novels, etc).

Usually, people tend to list their comics in Excel spreadsheets or other text documents. This is prefectly fine when you have dozens of entries but it doesn't stay viable when you have hundreds of entries.

A dedicated software is thusly the way to go. However, the existing managers suffered from many flaws:

Some were based on files, and unbearably slow to load and search through
Others were too generic, and not adapted to the needs of a specific subject. When the software offered a way to set custom fields, it was usually painful.
Usually, they were ugly. Adding a few icons doesn't make the now common grey interfaces much more attractive.
Most of the good ones aren't free.

And that's how Demyo was started, initially for a really small userbase.

Strengths

Compared to existing software, Demyo has the following strengths:

The collection is made of different entities: series are made of albums drawn and written by authors. This greatly reduces the risk of duplicating data (for example because you misspelled a publisher) and offers advanced searching capabilities.
Highly specialized: Demyo only manages comics, and it does so the right way. The software currently supports series, albums, authors (artists, writers, colorists), publishers, collections, book bindings, derivatives of arbitrary types (e.g. limited prints)... All entities have a wide number of fields to complete, many of which are optional.
Easy to use: Jump from an album, to its artist, to his other works, to a collaborator...
Pretty: using a Web frontend gives more room for nice graphics and effects. You can also set an unlimited amount of images for albums and derivatives, and browse them freely.
Uses tags rather than categories. This means that a given album can belong to an arbitrary number of categories (e.g. it can be both a thriller and a science-fiction novel). Tags can also be used in a lot of other ways.
Fast: Demyo is backed by a real database, not by files. This means it's usually faster to start up the program and search through the collection. It is still possible to backup your collection in files for archiving or sharing.
Paginated results: you no longer have a gigantic list of albums on a single screen and can instead browse a reasonable (and configurable) amount of data at once.
If you need to find an item quickly, quick searches are available. Type the part of an album title and wait for the list of matches to appear.
Cross-platform: Demyo is mainly developped on GNU/Linux, but the full system is tested to work on Windows, too.
Easy to install: On Windows, installing Demyo is a matter of 6 clicks.
Localized in English and French. Other translations are planned, but we have no translators (consider contributing).
Free and Open Source. No hidden costs.

Weaknesses

Demyo is still quite young and is free of charge, so it does have some weaknesses:

Limited compatibility with other collection managers. You can import data from spreadsheets (Excel, OpenOffice Calc, ...) and from BDGest. See the help for details.
You can't retrieve information automatically from some websites. Using content from the publishers' websites poses some legal issues. Reading the terms of service and contacting the publishers is planned, but is not considered of high priority.
Requires a Web server. These are usually harder to install than your average all-in-one manager. However, starting with Demyo 1.3.5, automated installers are available for both Windows and Linux: you don't need to know anything about Web servers.

License

Demyo is Free and Open Source, licensed under the GPL. It means you are legally free and encouraged to redistribute it.