Rooms and shelves

Library Setup — in your account menu, behind the avatar in the top corner, or My Library → Library tools → Shelves → Locations & shelf setup — is where you build your locations hierarchy: homes, storage areas, bookshelves, individual shelves, and boxes, nested as deep as you like (a shelf inside a bookshelf inside a room, for example). Add a top-level location by picking a type and giving it a name, then add children underneath it the same way. Locations belong to the library, not to whoever typed them in: every member sees the same rooms and shelves, any admin or member can add, rename, or delete them, and they stay put if the person who created them leaves.

You can also add one without coming here at all. Wherever a book asks where it is kept — on its own page, while scanning or typing it in, and when moving a batch of books at once — the dropdown ends with "Add a location…". It asks for a name, the kind of place, and what it sits inside, then files that book there. Anything made that way is an ordinary location: it appears in this list, in the library’s location filter, and on labels, exactly like one made here.

A library is not assumed to be in one place. Two homes, a home and an office, a house and a storage unit, a flat and a parents’ attic — all of these are ordinary, and the way to record them is to give the library a second top-level location of the type Home (or Storage) beside the first.

1. Go to Library Setup from your account menu, or from My Library → Library tools → Shelves → Locations & shelf setup.
2. At the bottom of the Locations panel, leave the type on Home and give it a name — "TX apartment", "Mum’s house", "Unit 14".
3. Add Location. It now sits beside your first home rather than inside it.
4. Add bookcases and shelves underneath each home separately, using the + that appears on a location when you hover it. Two shelves can share a name — "Top shelf" in each home is fine, because every dropdown shows the whole path.

Filtering the library to a home shows everything anywhere inside it, so "what is in Texas?" is one filter away, and a shelf label’s QR code does the same for one shelf. Moving books between homes in bulk is the Select mode described in Copies and moving books. There is no limit on how many homes or sites a library may have.

Adding a location — here or from a book’s location dropdown — is available to Admins and Members, and is enforced on the server. A Guest sees the locations and where each copy is kept, written out as plain text, but gets no dropdown to change a shelf with and no "Add a location…" entry.

• Adding Books — choosing where it goes →
• Sharing a Library — who can change locations →

Setting up rooms and bookcases is the moment you want to know how far along each one is, so every place in Library Setup reports what it can about itself. There are up to three numbers, they are three different claims, and they will disagree — that disagreement is the useful part, because it is the remainder still to catalogue.

Catalogued is how many copies your library records at that place. A container reports both its own and its contents’ — "0 catalogued here · 25 including what is inside it" — because a bookcase whose shelves hold twenty-five between them holds none of them directly, and either number alone answers only half the question. This one is counted fresh each time you look, so it cannot drift.

Seen is how many book spines the camera found in the most recent kept photograph of that shelf, and it says "about" for good reason: spines are found by looking for the edges between them, so a boxed set reads as one, a book lying flat reads as none, and a shelf photographed at an angle loses its far end. It always names the photograph’s date so you can open the picture and check it. It appears only where your library keeps its shelf photographs and that shelf has one — a shelf nobody has photographed shows nothing here, rather than a zero that would read as an empty shelf.

Expected is a number you type yourself — counted by hand, remembered from a move, or estimated. Nothing in AllMyBooks ever changes it: adding books, removing them, or photographing the shelf again all leave it exactly as you set it, and a number the app quietly corrected would be a number nobody could rely on. Leave it unset to say nothing, which is different from expecting zero. Clear it whenever you like.

Where two of them allow it, the shelf also says the shortfall in plain words — "7 of the 12 you expect here are not catalogued yet". That is a comparison of the two numbers shown beside it, not a fourth measurement, and a disagreement between any of the three is never flagged as an error.

Anyone who can see the library’s locations can read these numbers. Setting or clearing an expected count needs the same permission as creating or renaming a location, and is enforced on the server. The counts are the same, in the same words, on the website and in the phone app’s Settings → Library setup.

Once your rooms and bookcases are set up, Shelf overview — My Library → Library tools → Shelves → Shelf overview — draws them: every bookcase, every shelf, and the books recorded there standing as spines. It answers a different question from the library list. The list is for finding one book; this is for looking at the whole collection at once and recognising the room you are standing in.

Two things about it are guesses rather than records, and it says so on the page. Books are drawn left to right in the order they were added, on the assumption that is roughly how they were shelved — for a library that was imported or catalogued out of order, that order will simply be wrong, and the shelf is still worth looking at. And each spine takes its colour from the left edge of that book’s cover, which is a close guess at the real spine rather than a match: a cover with a white margin gives a pale spine whatever the book looks like. Books with no usable cover get a colour of their own instead.

Books your library holds but has not given a location appear in a "No location yet" tray at the bottom, with their count, rather than being left out — otherwise the drawing would quietly show a smaller library than you own. Giving one of them a location from its detail page moves it onto its shelf. Selecting any spine opens that book.

Shelves load as you scroll to them, so a large library opens without waiting for all of it. A shelf you have not reached yet shows its catalogued count rather than looking empty.

This is an experiment, and it reads your locations and books without changing either. Anyone who can see the library can open it.