Quote:
Originally Posted by Dullahir
Hey there, is there a search function to search for Calibre-Generated book covers or covers that have borders, so to speak?
|
OK - on Windows 7 you can do this procedurally, as described below
Just as I was about to post this I had an idea
I think I found a better way, involving an old but highly functional duplicate image finder I'll have a look at it and report back.
- Run both phases of Check Library and resolve discrepancies
- Close down Calibre
- Back up your library(ies)
- You will be reading the Calibre Library folders, so you need to be careful not to add, remove or change anything in them
You need a File Manager called xPlorer2 - its just a better Windows Explorer, the Free LITE version is all you need. It has a feature called Browse Flat, which allows you to see the files in a directory tree (such as a Calibre Library) as a single list. IMO its the best of breed of Free File Managers - very stable. There are some very sophisticated alternatives but the one's that don't crash generally cost money. Also X2 is the one I know, and for this task it worked well.
- In xplorer2 navigate to the Library folder, and select File->Browse Flat
- A Window will open showing all the files in the folder and all of its subfolders etc
- Click the Autofilter button and select 'pictures'
- Now you will just have all the cover.jpgs, Click the Views button and select Thumbnails
- Now you can see all the covers, what you do is to cull the good covers by removing them from the list, you can use the Delete key to do this. DO NOT use Shift/Delete as that will remove the cover from the list and the disk. And the end of the cull you be left with the not so good (bad) covers,
- Now switch back to Details View and select all the files (Ctrl/A)
- SHIFT/Right click the selected list of books - you should see an item Copy as Path, select it - that will copy the paths to the bad covers to the clipboard (its a Window 7 hidden feature, you can use it from Windows Explorer - why is it hidden, because programmers love hiding things)
- Open a Text editor (I suggest Notepad++ because it has a vertical editing mode (it calls its column editing) which is 'handy' to have) and paste the clipboard into a new file - the lines will look like
Code:
"E:\Calibre Libraries\Main\First Author\Some Book or Other (440)\cover.jpg"
"E:\Calibre Libraries\Main\First Author\Yet Another Book (3156)\cover.jpg"
"E:\Calibre Libraries\Main\Second Author\And Another Tome (3155)\cover.jpg"
- You need to edit the file to get this result
Code:
First Author,Some Book or Other
First Author,Yet Another Book
Second Author,And Another Tome
- Save the file somewhere (like the desktop) as a csv file - eg badcovers.csv
- Go into Calibre , you might want to Add a Custom column to your library, especially if you have a lot of 'bad covers', I suggest adding a Yes/No column called badcover (Bad Cover).
- You need the Import List plugin, install it if you don't already have it.
- I used the CSV option, so I'll assume its being used, select and and open the CSV File you put on the desktop - badcovers.csv. There's clip board/Reg Ex version if you prefer that method
- IMPORTANT At the bottom of the CSV panel, you'll see Title as 1 and Author as 2, flip them i.e. make Title as 2 and Author as 1.
- Click Next and the plug in will match the books in the library to those in the list - its what Kiwidude calls a 'Fuzzy" match, so there may be mismatches.
- At the top of the RHS list is a counter like 21 of 27 matches, you need to scroll though the list to find and resolve the mismatches. All should be resolvable because the library was the source of the CSV
- Now Click though the next panel and you will have the list of books with 'bad covers' in marked:imported_list - if its a short list you may be able to fix the bad covers now
- if its a long list then this is where the Bad Cover custom column can be used, select all the books and do a bulk edit to set the Bad Cover column to Yes (True). Now you can fix up the bad covers over time
It sounds a lot of work, and the culling of the covers is tedious - took me about 40 mins to cull about 2,800 'good covers' from a library of 3,330 books. However the rest of it is straightforward and not too much work - although I admit that I was using tools & techniques with which I am very familiar, so...
Zabkat xplorer2 Lite can be downloaded here
http://zabkat.com/alldown.htm
Notepad++ can be downloaded here
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.3.2.html
Import List is here
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=187831
BR