Thread: Is there a Way to Simplify Tags
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Old 02-12-2018, 03:30 PM   #2
sjfan
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Meido View Post
So I've got most of my library added to Calibre, but the tags are becoming unwieldy.

I have over 13k tags...is there anyway to parse this down or simplify them? Is there a way to automate it, assuming it isn't already? I just don't want to have to go in and manually do it for every book.
You can rename tags, which will merge them. So if you currently have 200 "Fantasy" and 100 "Fiction/Fantasy" books and you rename "Fiction/Fantasy" to simply "Fantasy", then you'll now have 300 "Fantasy" books (or fewer, if some books were tagged with both).

So:
1. Figure out a set of tags that you want to use. I have a pretty minimal set (Fiction, Nonfiction, Cooking, Computing, Biography/Autobiography, Art, History, Craft, Writing, Drama, Mythology, Manual, Journal/Paper, Short Stories, Poetry, Mystery, Thriller, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Alternate History, Young Adult, Children, maybe a few more) because I find that more useful than super-specific tags as far as searching goes. If you have, say, a huge collection of Science Fiction then maybe you want to split that into a few more categories (Cyberpunk, Space Opera, etc) depending on what your needs are, or maybe you need History - American, History - European, etc. Think about it and decide how you want to structure things.
2. Using the tag browser on the left, start renaming tags (if you've settled on "Mystery", then you can start renaming "Fiction - Mystery", "Detective", etc all into Mystery).
3. Tags that you don't find useful you can just delete in the tag browser (without having to remove them from individual books). So just hit Del on garbage tags and it'll get rid of it from all books.

The other thing you can do is bulk-edit, so you could (for instance) select all your Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov books, do a search/replace on ".*" in tags and replace with "Fiction, Science Fiction", and then select all the short story collections and add "Short Stories" to them. Then go correct whatever handful of their books that's wrong for. This will wipe out all the bogus tags that were on all those books. This is especially handy for authors that work almost entirely in one genre and for magazines/journals; you can cut through wide swaths of books quickly.

Hopefully that gets you a jump on the problem. Then you just need remember to edit the tags on new books as you add them.
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