Plug-in for adding covers from disk

[ghappe]

Hello there,

I'm rather new to Calibre, just testing if it will support my collection of 35.000 e-books.

First problem I've run into is that, since I have all the covers of these books as a separate .jpg files on disk I'll manually have to go trough them and add them in "Edit Meta-data Individually", and that looks like a lot of work.

Could this not be achieved by a plug-in to be added to the "Download Covers" option in "Download Meta-data And Covers", just like the rest of the external sources on the internet but then a named directory on disk?

Is there such a option or other workaround?, and if not, is anyone willing to create one?

Love to hear from you, so, kind greetings,

Guido Happé

[BetterRed]

@ghappe - if you could organise your ebooks into one folder per book and merge the covers into the folders then I think you you could use the Add Books one book per folder option - you may have to rename the jpgs to cover.jpg, once they were in the book folders of course. You could probably do that with a couple of scripts, there are people here who can probably help you with that.

What conventions do you use for existing book file and cover file names ? And what operating/file system?

BR

[ghappe]

Hello BetterRed,

Using Win 8.1 and j.rivers MediaCenter as application, which works fine for my 35.000 Cd albums but a bit limited for e-books (All e-Pub's).

Convention on disk is \media-type\Author\Title\series_index - title - serie - language - author-sort.file-type which makes it available to many other applications.

Hope this answers your question.

Kind greetings,

Guido

[BetterRed]

Where are the jpgs in relationship to the epubs - if they're in the \media-type\Author\Title folders as series_index - title - serie - language - author-sort.jpg then try renaming them to cover.jpg and then use the Add Books->one book per folder option.

When your ready a search for "Windows Recursive Rename" will provide links to suitable scripts to do the renaming in bulk, also utilities. If you're not comfortable at the command line try Bulk Rename Utility (BRU), ANT Rename is also good.

I hope you've copied a subset of your mediacentre library for testing. I'd hate to think I might suggest something that would wipe out all you videos, music, books, photos and tax returns

BR

[ghappe]

Hello BetterRed,

Thanks for yoyr reply and Yes, there in the same folder and renaming them to cover.jpg is no problem, however after importing them with Add Books->one book per folder option. I still have NO cover with the book, so, What am I missing here?

Kind greetings,

Guido

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ghappe

Hello BetterRed,

Thanks for yoyr reply and Yes, there in the same folder and renaming them to cover.jpg is no problem, however after importing them with Add Books->one book per folder option. I still have NO cover with the book, so, What am I missing here?

I'm not sure, I've never actually tried to do what I'm suggesting you do - which is not my normal way of doing things here - I usually only post what I know works. These add settings worked for me.



But I think that means you wont be able to have a template to get the author, title and series etc from file name. Is that data embedded in the epubs, you can see what's there if you open one with the calibre viewer and click the blue 'i' button.

are the covers in the Books themselves ?

BR

[ghappe]

Hello BetterRed,

If I use these settings, reading Meta-data from file-contents I get the cover that is already in the Epub, and that's not what I want.
Besides, if It could be don during initial loading of the books I still have the problem if I want to replace covers, without destroying all the edits i have made after loading the book into Calibre so I have to look elsewhere for a solution.

But thanks for your time and effort to help me.

Kind greetings,

Guido

[theducks]

look at the commandline tools help page: calibredb (add --cover section)

It will take some scripting effort to align your folders to the {id}

since not all books need covers:
search for: covers:false to show a list


additionally: some books may just have unidentified covers (and not the first image). The Quality check PI might help identify candidates for further work

[ghappe]

Thank you, Duckies, (Nice cat by the way...)

unfortunately this is not going to help me, I'm not a programmer so...

Anyway I'm surprised that nobody brought this up before because I know quit a few people having the same problem (In fact it is mainly a migration issue) and there's even a friend of mine having over 200.000 publications, all e-pub, where the covers are external. (And I don't think he'll fancy adding them all manually)

So, question remains, is there a way to add any number of covers from disk or do I face the choice between 40 days of hard labour or look for an other application, which is probably hard to find.

Kind greetings,


Guido Happé

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ghappe

Hello BetterRed,

If I use these settings, reading Meta-data from file-contents I get the cover that is already in the Epub, and that's not what I want.
Besides, if It could be don during initial loading of the books I still have the problem if I want to replace covers, without destroying all the edits i have made after loading the book into Calibre so I have to look elsewhere for a solution.

But thanks for your time and effort to help me.

Kind greetings,

Guido

@ghappe - Don't do any editing before the cover issue is resolved, copy a subset of what you have and work with that - a dozen books is probably enough.

calibre has 3.5 million active users, if any of them had this issue when they first built their libraries then they probably solved it via the existing facilities and some scripts. If anyone solved it with a PI it would have been a one-off hack peculiar to their environment that they possibly threw away.

The command line option theducks suggested is the what I suspect other people used within a script/batch file.

Can your media manager software inject 'your' covers into the epubs?

BR

[ghappe]

Good morning BetterRed,

Oh, those time-zone's, reminds me of the past when I flew around the world to do my job, days long gone now, however, I have no facilities to insert the covers into the e-pub files, if I did I would not have this problem.

Still, I think that anyone who could create a plug-in for a website on the internet could easily change this code to do the same look-up in a local folder and I still think it strange that its not in the standard software because anyone having a large collection will likely customise or personalize the covers of branch dedicated e-pub's.

So, maybe one of the developers will pick this one up?

I'll be very much of-line for the next 12 hours, you know, sleep and things like that...

Have a nice day and smile to the world if you can.

Guido

[gbm]

Originally Posted by ghappe

Hello BetterRed,

If I use these settings, reading Meta-data from file-contents I get the cover that is already in the Epub, and that's not what I want.
Besides, if It could be don during initial loading of the books I still have the problem if I want to replace covers, without destroying all the edits i have made after loading the book into Calibre so I have to look elsewhere for a solution.

But thanks for your time and effort to help me.

Kind greetings,

Guido

Use the modify epub plug-in after you have imported into calibre to change covers. Look at one of the meta data plug-ins and modify it to do imports from a local folder.

bernie

[ghappe]

Good morning Bernie,

Yes, that's what I suggested in the first place but I wouldn't know where to start not being a programmer...

Kind greetings,

Guido

[davidfor]

It might be more natural to add this to the Import List plugin. It reads a CSV file to get metadata for books in the library. Specifying a file name for the cover and adding it to the metadata shouldn't be to hard.

And no, I am not volunteering.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by davidfor

It might be more natural to add this to the Import List plugin. It reads a CSV file to get metadata for books in the library. Specifying a file name for the cover and adding it to the metadata shouldn't be to hard.

And no, I am not volunteering.

I was thinking that the 'dude' might have already had the option, so I looked harder at the PI

I agree, this is a logical place.

And NO, I don't code either (I can barely read (understand) some of what you all write ) for all of you for your efforts