MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Is this "bulk edit" problematic in Calibre?

haertig · 07-03-2021, 12:12 PM

I have a Calibre library for "novels" which contains 6000+ books. I want to do some mass editing of the tags (removing some of them). Is this advisable to do on a large quantity of books via the Calibre GUI?

e.g., One of the tag pairs I have is Fiction or Non-Fiction. My entire collection only contains 33 tagged as Non-Fiction, the rest are Fiction. That's a pretty useless tag pair for me to keep maintaining as I add new books. So is it safe to go to the GUI, select every single book (6000+), and then do EditMetadata->RemoveTags and get rid of all Fiction and Non-Fiction tags?

Bottom line: Are large scale bulk edits problematic in Calibre? I am indeed running a very old version of Calibre, version 3.48, on a Linux computer. This is because I simply have seen no reason to upgrade, and potentially mess up the DeDRM plugin that I depend on for all the books I purchase. I used to upgrade Calibre religiously, but stopped when the big internal changes that occurred in version 4 were new and maybe not fully fleshed out at the time. And I stayed stopped on upgrades when I read about incompatibilities of some Calibre versions with DeDRM. That may have all changed by now, but "If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It" is a valid upgrade strategy IMHO. If the bulk edit that I want to do now is not safe in 3.48, but is safe in later versions, then that would be a reason for me to upgrade.

Thanks in advance for any tips.

p.s. - My Calibre database is well backed up, so nothing I might attempt and fail at would be a disaster. However, there's no need to make work for myself and have to go through restoring from backup if what I am attempting is known to cause problems. Just don't do potentially problematic things in the first place.

07-03-2021, 12:12 PM	#1
haertig Wizard Posts: 1,899 Karma: 31522252 Join Date: Sep 2017 Device: PW3, Fire HD8 Gen7, Moto G7, Sansa Clip v2, Ruizu X26	Is this "bulk edit" problematic in Calibre? I have a Calibre library for "novels" which contains 6000+ books. I want to do some mass editing of the tags (removing some of them). Is this advisable to do on a large quantity of books via the Calibre GUI? e.g., One of the tag pairs I have is Fiction or Non-Fiction. My entire collection only contains 33 tagged as Non-Fiction, the rest are Fiction. That's a pretty useless tag pair for me to keep maintaining as I add new books. So is it safe to go to the GUI, select every single book (6000+), and then do EditMetadata->RemoveTags and get rid of all Fiction and Non-Fiction tags? Bottom line: Are large scale bulk edits problematic in Calibre? I am indeed running a very old version of Calibre, version 3.48, on a Linux computer. This is because I simply have seen no reason to upgrade, and potentially mess up the DeDRM plugin that I depend on for all the books I purchase. I used to upgrade Calibre religiously, but stopped when the big internal changes that occurred in version 4 were new and maybe not fully fleshed out at the time. And I stayed stopped on upgrades when I read about incompatibilities of some Calibre versions with DeDRM. That may have all changed by now, but "If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It" is a valid upgrade strategy IMHO. If the bulk edit that I want to do now is not safe in 3.48, but is safe in later versions, then that would be a reason for me to upgrade. Thanks in advance for any tips. p.s. - My Calibre database is well backed up, so nothing I might attempt and fail at would be a disaster. However, there's no need to make work for myself and have to go through restoring from backup if what I am attempting is known to cause problems. Just don't do potentially problematic things in the first place.