Managing Tags

[crossi]

How do you manage your tags? Just pick one or two of the most appropriate genres or as many as have any applicability? When I download metadata I often get a dozen or so tags most of which I remove in order to keep things simple. Does anyone use lots of tags for their books and how does it work for you? Do you put the series as a tag or just leave that info in the series column?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I load up as many tags as possible. So far, that has worked well for me in searches. I don't put in series tags; the series column works better for that.

[kiwidude]

I'm a "keep things simple" person - I only use the tags downloaded for unfamiliar books as a guide to which of my own tags to put on it overwriting them. I found the metadata tags to be fairly useless for keeping due to all the duplicated variants e.g. "Sci-fi", "Sci fi", "Science fiction" and however many others. Let alone all the obscure tags. If I was the sort of person who wanted to lookup books set in a certain city or something then yeah they might be useful, but I would rather use Google for obscure searches.

I also wanted the tags to be readable on screen in the library view - which means only a few in the column to keep it narrow. I use a lot of one character ones for special meanings, like '£' for owning the paper copy, '+' for having read it, '-' for a missing wishlist item, '!' for EPUB/MOBI processed how I like it, '*' for need to find a better quality format to convert etc, etc.

I did start off just having a single tag representing the genre but found I had so many books that were genuine cross genre I relaxed that rule. Also created a tag of "Short" that I then add for short stories, as discovered that "Sci-fi Short" and "Fantasy Short" were not sufficient when you permutations of short stories for other genres too.

And no I don't put series in the tags, haven't found a need as yet since the series column does the job better in terms of sorting etc.

Tagging is a very personal process though, there are always circumstances you come across which force you to re-evaluate. At least with Calibre there are lots of ways to experiment with such as custom columns etc. I've avoided those to date (library view column space too precious) but nice to know they are there if needed.

[Nyssa]

I'm more like kiwidude - I use the metadata tags as a guideline towards my own, then prune/rename accordingly. I also make sure to include where I downloaded the book,( Amazon, Smashwords, etc), and whether or not it was free.

[DoctorOhh]

I turn off downloading tags in the metadata download plugins. Then I add 1 to 4 tags as I see fit. Sometimes I use Amazon as a starting point for assessing tag options.

I use the designed series column for series info.