Top Twenty-four Tags by popularity

[DoctorOhh]

Just for fun here are the top twenty-four tags in my finished Calibre library. I used Goodreads as my source for tag information and currently have 227 individual tags. Before redoing my tags with Goodreads I had roughly as many Tags (1000+) as I had Series.

[2466] Mystery
[1917] Fantasy
[1724] Science Fiction
[1371] Romance
[990] Thriller
[928] Crime
[881] Paranormal
[880] Young Adult
[798] Historical Fiction
[725] Urban Fantasy
[644] Non-Fiction
[624] Adventure
[606] Classics
[499] Chick Lit
[487] Humor
[468] Doctor Who
[387] Suspense
[383] Horror
[369] Children's
[276] Detective
[273] Cozy Mystery
[266] Biographies & Memoirs
[242] History
[200] Military

My Calibre library currently:

8160 books
2270 Authors
1120 Series
227 Tags

[speakingtohe]

That is interesting. Never occurred to me to sort tags by popularity.
Helen

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

That is interesting. Never occurred to me to sort tags by popularity.

I never sort them this way either but I was curious today how things looked after fully completing re-tagging everything using the Goodreads metadata plugin.

[speakingtohe]

Sorting this way is pretty usefull for getting rid of junk tags. Much easier for me than the tag manager.
Esp those redundant tags like "mystery & detective" where it is also tagged as mystery, detective, detective & mystery etc. I just rename tag to mystery, detective and there it is. Just seems simpler in tag viewer.

Thanks
Helen

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Esp those redundant tags like "mystery & detective" where it is also tagged as mystery, detective, detective & mystery etc. I just rename tag to mystery, detective and there it is.

I am down to only one compound tag, Biographies & Memoirs.

[paulfiera]

That looks great.

How did you manage to get rid of the unwanted tags and end with only those? I'd love to be able to do that too. I have currently 1.850 different tags. Many of them with just dates.

Let me guess: You download tags only from goodreads and you redownloaded the Metadata?

[Agama]

Interesting.

Just imagine 8000+ books in physical format in your own house!

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by paulfiera

Let me guess: You download tags only from goodreads and you redownloaded the Metadata?

That's exactly what I did. I redownloaded metadata for all 8000 books in my library. It took a while reviewing Goodreads book pages before I had all of the major tags mapped in the goodreads configuration. In my updated goodreads.json file (attached) I have expanded the default tag mappings supplied with the goodreads plugin from 60? tags to 227 final tags.

If you wanted to take advantage of my mapping efforts follow these steps.

1. Exit calibre
2. Find you calibre_configuration/plugins directory (your directory name may differ).
3. Rename the goodreads.json file to goodreads.json.original (in case you want to go back to this file.)
4. Unzip the attached goodreads.json file into your calibre_configuration/plugins directory
5. Start calibre

You can now go to Preferences - Metadata download - Goodreads - Configure selected source to see what goodread tags I mapped.

Good Luck.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Agama

Interesting.

Just imagine 8000+ books in physical format in your own house!

I was in the US Navy for 22 years and moved 10 times during those 22 years. Each move I was allotted so much weight for my stuff before I had to pay out of pocket. 8000 books would have cost me a pretty penny each time I moved. That is why I loved yard sales in Navy housing because folks were looking to off load items before they moved.

[paulfiera]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

If you wanted to take advantage of my mapping efforts follow these steps...

Good Luck.

Many thanks, dwanthny

I'm gonna do just that. As they are now, my tags are completely unusable.

Many thanks for the json file. It'll surely save me a lot of work.

[transmitthis]

You may want to use upper case L in "Diets, Weight loss"

Nice work, I'm still in two minds about tags and genres
At present I have a Genre column which is well sorted, and has limited entries.
For Tags I tend to want more info.

For example I would have a book with the Genre Science-Fiction and the tag would have extra info like space opera, Aliens, Culture, Dystopian, Future, etc

Not really sure on the best approach

[speakingtohe]

@transmitthis
When you figure it out, let us know. I have way too many tags and am wittling them down but 227 might not be enough

@dwanthy
I shall have to investigate tag mapping

Helen

[transmitthis]

Sure
I believe that if you want to do what dwanthny did, you first have to delete all your tags, otherwise they just get added on to the ones you already have. So a backup is in order.

But that leaves me with the problem, what about the books that I have personally tagged - the ones that may not be found by goodreads or other metadata tag gatherers.

Can't really go through all my books just selecting the ones I didn't tag for good reads to retag, so will end up loosing my tags on the ones I did myself.....

Think I'll stick with Genres for now, may even nest them. As for tags, I'm just going to go through and delete the ones with more than 10 tags, and let good reads retag those.

Then wait for inspiration.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by transmitthis

You may want to use upper case L in "Diets, Weight loss"

Thanks, I changed it to a upper case L to be consistent with my other double word tags. Turns out the two books I had tagged already had upper case Ls.

Originally Posted by transmitthis

I believe that if you want to do what dwanthny did, you first have to delete all your tags, otherwise they just get added on to the ones you already have.

This is true. I did my update during the month or so when the tags were overwritten by default.

Originally Posted by transmitthis

So a backup is in order.

But that leaves me with the problem, what about the books that I have personally tagged - the ones that may not be found by goodreads or other metadata tag gatherers.

Backup your tag column to a custom column, then you can update your tags as time permits.

Originally Posted by transmitthis

Can't really go through all my books just selecting the ones I didn't tag for good reads to retag, so will end up loosing my tags on the ones I did myself.....

If you come to grips that this isn't a one day job and tackle it a piece at a time you can review the the tags as you go and not lose your unique tags. You may even find that your unique tags can be included in the mapping for future syncing.

Originally Posted by transmitthis

As for tags, I'm just going to go through and delete the ones with more than 10 tags, and let good reads retag those.

Seems like as good a starting point as any.

Originally Posted by transmitthis

Then wait for inspiration.

You're Welcome.

[paulfiera]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Just for fun here are the top twenty-four tags in my finished Calibre library. I used Goodreads as my source for tag information and currently have 227 individual tags.

I've been using this approach for many days and cleaning out my tags using only Goodreads as tags source and it's great, but there's one thing that I'm not sure...

I have a lot of spy novels tagged as Espionage. Fetching Goodreads tags, none of these have the Espionage tag. You'd believe that John le Carré's Smiley series would be tagged as Espionage but no, they are tagged only as Mistery, Thriller.

If I, on the other hand, also use tags from Google, I get Espionage, but I also get a lot of nonsense and most of the time, the author's name or the series' name as tags, which I do not want.

EDIT: On second thoughts, maybe Espionage is not the right Goodreads tag to use. Looking at the books listed in this category - http://www.goodreads.com/genres/espionage - brings some surprises: Ally Carter? Dexter? Granted, there's a couple of Daniel Silva and John le Carré books in there but most of them don't strike me as "classic spy novels"