[Starson17]

Originally Posted by rchiav

It's more of the "I know I have all the metadata how I want it and I'm done".

I have my search bar set to "not tag:done". There are no books visible because all my books are tagged "done". When I drag new books in, the new ones are the only books that appear. I work on them, and when I'm comfortable, I highlight them all hit "e," type "done" on the tag line and click OK. I'm through and ready for the next batch.

Realistically, however, they are often not truly done. I may decide later that I want a cover image from Google Images even though the automatic fetcher didn't pull one. Or I may want to change the series name or number (Conan stories have an entire Wikipedia page just on the multiple numbering schemes for series). I use the false searches to find them.

Any new book that I brought in would immediately fall into the "in-progress" category because I haven't checked it. It you could auto apply that to any imported book, it would be very helpful. Having another field to designate status would also be very helpful.

You're still new to Calibre. You may want to read the FAQ about proposed new fields that people often want. If you've got a suggested improvement, the bug tracker is the best place to put it.

Right now I have 17 books in Calibre and I've pulled down metadata from the web. These 17 books now have 99 total tags. If I add a tag for workflow, it's 100. I don't mind the 99 tags to describe what's in the book, but having to scroll through 99 tags, and I presume there will be more as I add more books, to filter books based on whether or not I'm done with them seems less efficient than it could be.

Very few people do it that way. Most have a few tags they know - "done", "read", "news", "myname" and "my-wife's-name" are typical. They simply type those in the search bar, or call up the last remembered search. That's how I usually do it.

Alternatively, many people turn off the metadata tags from fetching. Some ereaders create groups based on tags and they do not want all those tags that come from fetching online.

Not marking a book as either "complete" or "in progress" would also leave me personally wondering, "wait, did I clean that one up?"

Type not tag:complete and not tag:"in progress" will show them all (assuming you tagged as you describe), and you'd quickly see if they had covers, ratings, publisher info, etc.

The other option is to delete all the other tags and just use tags for workflow I guess.

It's really not necessary. They really can do all the jobs quite easily and far more easily than putting them into separate folders.

So for right now I'll have a folder for ebooks that I haven't run through Calibre and a folder for anything I know has the correct metadata, etc.

You are free to do it your way. However, everyone I've introduced to Calibre has eventually made the same transition I made and has used tags instead of folders. It really does work well.