Quote:
Originally Posted by enonod
I understand the 'hands off' aspect of the library, but with photography the same type of library can be used but the metadata (keywords or categories) are usually saved direct to the photographs as well as the database. In that way it is always safe to assume that 'any' database could be constructed from the metadata contained in the images and a specific database is not required. At the instant the keywords are added to the database, they are written to the image and it takes a fraction of a second.
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a) All the professional and many consumer image management packages I know of store the metadata in a database and optionally in the image or sidecar files. Many pro's don't like the original files being polluted with extra stuff like ratings, categories, titles etc, i.e they want the RAW kept in the same state as it left the camera.
b) The metadata definitions for imaging are much more mature than those available for ebooks, mainly via the EXIF, IPTC and XMP 'standards'. I suspect this is partly due to most image creators being more intimately involved with their final product - than are writers are with their books, the latter have traditionally required intermediaries, editors, publishers, distributors etc. Also imaging has broader direct usage than books generally have - eg medical, forensics, military, aerospace, manufacturing, search and rescue, surveillance, intelligence etc etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by enonod
I note that if an author is changed the (sometimes very large) books are moved, which is no less time consuming and makes the folders inviolable.
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With advanced file systems, eg NFS, HFS+, NTFS etc, when a folder (directory) is renamed (or moved within a device) it all happens within the file system index/directory/master file table structures. The contents of the folder are not moved, so a folder containing 200GB of data can be renamed just as fast as folder with 2KB can be. This is not true of primitive file systems such as FAT or BDOS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by enonod
I wonder how many cries for help there have been in this forum because somebody 'made a mistake' or lost their 'presence of mind' or moved several books because they were doing some disk tidying etc. etc. and did not remember/realise that it would screw their Calibre, simply because that was farthest from their mind.
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Yes that happens a bit, but given there are 3.5 million active users, perhaps its not as often as you might be imagining -
http://status.calibre-ebook.com/.
BR