Problem with no HDD room for library copies

[pmpelfrey]

As far as I have been able to find out, there is no way to control or prevent Calibre from creating copies of all your books that you want it to manage, in its default folders. This creates an untenable situation for me, since I have a huge collection of ebooks from my twenty-plus years of collecting. Is there any way around this? I would be willing to move the files to the Calibre folders, somehow in advance, or in bits and pieces, IF I were more confident of being able to categorize them in large chunks instead of one at a time. Now I have most sorted by genre and authors, but seems like Calibre doesn't recognize and automatically assign categories. Any strategies that users can recommend to handling this kind of situation? I just don't forsee having money for another large HDD anytime soon, which would help of course to just dedicate a large HDD to Calibre.

[eschwartz]

You could use a "staging" library, and use the right-click "Copy to library" action to move properly-organized books to the main library once their metadata meets your approval.

Import chunks, tag them properly (maybe, assume all current books in library are from xxx genre? easy to fix that in bulk), then use Copy To Library (Delete After Copy) to clean up and get ready to import a new batch.

Or, as long as the ebook has the metadata properly embedded in the ebook file itself, calibre will recognize those metadata Subject tags (for genre) and author/title/etc. metadata as applicable.
But I am going to guess based on your failure that the metadata (certainly genres) isn't embedded.


...


Alternatively, see the Preferences ==> Adding books settings. You can choose to derive metadata from the filename rather than file contents.
Set a suitable regular expression based on your current file/folder organization.

[pmpelfrey]

I appreciate the ideas, which I will sure try!

[eschwartz]

Happy to help!

Tell us how it goes.