[fidvo]

Here are some of the ways I use (abuse) Calibre, and some other ways I've thought of but decided against.

Image Catalog:

I find that most images on my hard drive are already part of a series. For instance, I might have a series of pictures I took on vacation, so the entire vacation set would count as one series.

It's easy, then, to turn a series of images into a single .cbz file (just zip the images and rename the extension), which I then import into Calibre. Pretty straightforward. You could use the Published column to store the date the pictures were taken (or the date the first photo was taken if you have picture sets that span more than one day), or create your own custom date column for this.

I still haven't found a satisfactory way to use Calibre to store individual images that aren't easily categorized. You could technically go with 1 record per picture, but then you double the hard drive space because you'll use the same picture for the "book" record and the cover. You could just not store the cover, but since the picture itself is usually the single most important piece of data about it, you want that visible as you're browsing them.

Movies:

For movies, the Author usually isn't all that important, so I repurpose the field with a variation of the title so that they're easy to look up if for some reason you have to peek into the library folder. (I know. Don't do this)

For TV shows, I generally put the season and episode number in the title field and use a custom field for the episode title. I number the series with the formula: 1000*Season + Episode. So, for instance, Episode 5 of Season 3 would have a series index of 3005. This also allows me to insert special episodes that aren't a part of the regular season for the rare show that has them. I start counting these at (Season * 1000) + 100, so Special Episode 1 after Season 3 would have series index 3101. It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.

I also have a plain text Notes record for each show for information about it.

Music:

Technically you could use Calibre as an iTunes replacement. Depending on the type of music, you might want to put the performer (modern music) or composer (classical music) in the Author field. Series would be Album, but you might want to create multiple fields of this type if you have "Best of" collections.

I decided against storing my music in Calibre because of the difficulty of transferring the files to my mp3 player, although I'm exploring some new possibilities of using Calibre's save-to-file template to save the files directly to a micro-SD card that my mp3 player will recognize.

Audio Lectures:

I have the same issue with using Calibre for Audio Lectures as I do with Music, so I don't use Calibre for this. I started to do it once, but changed my mind.

Lectures usually come in series, so I just used the lecturer as the author, and the lecture series as the series. I don't remember whether I put the lecture title in the title field or used a numbering system like for TV shows and used a custom column for the lecture title. You could make an argument for either system.

For the lectures I listen to, the only supplemental material is the occasional PDF file with lecture notes. I haven't come across any lectures that have more than one supplemental file per lecture, so I can't help you with cases where you might have several PDF's or software to run with it.

Notes:

Yes, Calibre makes a decent note taking system. I use a custom "Path" column for categorizing my notes into a hierarchical system, but I also use the built-in tags column to look up notes on different subjects. To add a new note, you could just use the Add New feature and have it generate a blank file (I mostly take notes in plain text files, so this works fine), but I work from a template file, which I can duplicate from that same Add New screen to create the note.

Recipes:

Calibre makes a surprisingly good recipe catalog. One record per recipe. Tag them however you want. I use the same type of system as I do with notes, using a template for creating new recipe records. To compile them all into my own custom recipe book, I use save-to-file then run a custom script I wrote to merge the files and convert it to HTML, which I can then import back into Calibre as a single book file. I plan to eventually turn that script into a Calibre plugin so that I can skip the whole save-to-file step, although it's so specialized to my workflow that I doubt I'll upload it here once I write it unless I can figure out how to generalize it so it doesn't make so many assuptions.

Software:

I don't use Calibre for this, but it seems to me like it would make a decent program launcher if you have a lot of programs to run. There are two ways to handle the programs themselves. You could, in theory, import the .exe files into Calibre then transfer the supporting files into the library manually. Everything about this screams "Don't do it!" because you're really not supposed to go poking around in the library folder. Plus, Calibre will rename the .exe file when you import it, which in some cases might cause the software not to run.

Another way would be to create shortcuts to the programs and store those in Calibre instead. Aside from portability issues, this is a better method in all regards.

Final Notes:

I use Calibre Portable so I can keep everything on my external hard drive. For extreme portability, I created a "Util" folder under my main Calibre Portable folder, which stores portable versions of programs such as VLC, Notepad++, and other viewers/editors. Then I use the Open With plugin with relative links to these programs. (I don't think the built-in Open With feature can handle relative links, which is why I still use the plugin) That way, if I'm ever on a computer without these file types registered or registered to a program I don't like, I can always use Open With to send them to the "embedded" version of the software.