Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
First let me apologise for the somewhat pedantic tone of this post, if it seems like I feel I know all the answers, it's because I do 
Let's take a step back and ask a slightly metaphysical question:
"Why do you store files in folders?"
I'm betting the answer to that is some version of the following two themes
a) I want to be able to find them easily
b) I want to categorize them
Now lets address these themes vis-a-vis calibre vs. the file system
a) When you want to find a file, 99% of the time, what you actually want is the book that file contains. In other words rather than searching for a file you are searching for a book title or author or genre or whatever. Now that kind of search is significantly more efficient when using a dedicated interface for it, like calibre.
b) Folders are really just a system of hierarchical tags. So when you put a file in the folder /mystery/asimov/foundation/ what you're saying is that the file is a mytery written by asimov and part of the foudation series. But the book could in general belong to many overlapping categories. For example the book is also scifi and future history and a hugo winner and written by a dead author and so on. There is no way you can express these kinds of relationships using hierarchical tags, but you can using arbitrary, i.e. non hierarchical tags, which is what calibre gives you. |
You are, of course, right. Structuring our files on only one criteria is incredibly limited. Because people want more, and all that info included, metadata was invented. It is quite successfully implemented in ID3 tags for MP3, EXIF tags for images, and so on. When we use a search engine, we expect to be able to search this data. Picasa implements this by caching those tags in files in each directory with images. Many music players use databases. But what they all have in common is that none of them needed to copy the files into a special directory structure.
What everyone I know has in common is how they store their files. Music is by band, video by series, pictures by event, and books by author. That storage system is pretty much universal, and it is that way because it's how we intuitively sort them in our heads. Yes, we do use further 'tags', but those are the main ways we sort things.
...I guess what I'm saying is that while calibre is certainly the way I'll open the book, as picasa is how I'll look at images, for some strange reason I like that mental directory structure to continue to exist. Others do to - that is the reason early image viewing programs which imported all the pictures, as calibre does with books, became unpopular. I understand that changing the code so that you didn't have to import the files in the strange way you do now would take a lot of effort, and no one is paying you to maintain/create this. And seriously, I think you spend one helluva lot of time on it already. So, I'm personally OK now with it. I always saw your point that there was no point in having our own directory structure. But damn it, we're used to having coders bend over backwards to suit us. Here, it's a monopoly
So don't be mad or anything - this is just how I view the situation.
Cheers! Now to
