Importing fair sized library without duplicates

foosion · 09-29-2011, 11:23 AM

I have a library of many hundreds of ebooks in various formats, in a directory and its subdirectories. There are some duplicates, usually because I've converted a book to another format and kept both versions.

EDIT:

1) The filenames for my existing books are a mess. For example, some are title author, some author title, some just title, some are in author subdirs, etc. Is there any way to get Calibre to identify books correctly, or am I looking at a lot of manual editing?

2) When trying to import all of my books, I got an error message about Calibre hanging, with the suggestion to try importing fewer books at once. Calibre left a few calibre-parallel threads running that I had to kill manually in process explorer.

Is the best course to delete Calibre's library (see theducks' response below) and restart with smaller imports?

3) What's the best way to import my library into Calibre without duplicates, or to eliminate duplicates following the import?

4) Would the best solution for duplicates be to import all, the use the find duplicates plug-in, once I've imported and cleaned things up? https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=131017

theducks · 09-29-2011, 12:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by foosion

By the way, I'm currently just importing the whole library in order to play with the software. If I should start over, how to delete this import?

Simple

Delete the folder you chose for the Library. Calibre COPIES books from sources (manipulates the file name) into its folder structure. Metadata.db is what you basically see in the UI.

Noughty · 10-09-2011, 04:04 AM

For fixing titles, author isbn plug in is very useful. It extracts ISBN from file. After that download metadata and you'll get correct title. Warning that it doesn't always find isbn in file and sometimes haven't isbn doesn't help it the source you are downloading metadata from doesn't have the isbn for the book.

But it does help with a fair amount of books.

There's a chance of downloading wrong metadata (for a different book). That's why I always download only matadata and never covers. I extract covers from file so I can check if the book matches the title

09-29-2011, 11:23 AM	#1
foosion Connoisseur Posts: 59 Karma: 4562 Join Date: Sep 2011 Device: Pixel 4a	Importing fair sized library without duplicates I have a library of many hundreds of ebooks in various formats, in a directory and its subdirectories. There are some duplicates, usually because I've converted a book to another format and kept both versions. EDIT: 1) The filenames for my existing books are a mess. For example, some are title author, some author title, some just title, some are in author subdirs, etc. Is there any way to get Calibre to identify books correctly, or am I looking at a lot of manual editing? 2) When trying to import all of my books, I got an error message about Calibre hanging, with the suggestion to try importing fewer books at once. Calibre left a few calibre-parallel threads running that I had to kill manually in process explorer. Is the best course to delete Calibre's library (see theducks' response below) and restart with smaller imports? 3) What's the best way to import my library into Calibre without duplicates, or to eliminate duplicates following the import? 4) Would the best solution for duplicates be to import all, the use the find duplicates plug-in, once I've imported and cleaned things up? https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=131017 Last edited by foosion; 09-29-2011 at 12:50 PM.

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10-09-2011, 04:04 AM	#3
Noughty Addict Posts: 352 Karma: 103850 Join Date: Apr 2011 Device: Kindle NT	For fixing titles, author isbn plug in is very useful. It extracts ISBN from file. After that download metadata and you'll get correct title. Warning that it doesn't always find isbn in file and sometimes haven't isbn doesn't help it the source you are downloading metadata from doesn't have the isbn for the book. But it does help with a fair amount of books. There's a chance of downloading wrong metadata (for a different book). That's why I always download only matadata and never covers. I extract covers from file so I can check if the book matches the title

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