Covers (and sometimes tags) not staying with saved EPUB?

[burnafterreading]

ok, i need some help...

here's my workflow when doing clean-up of a number of books. regardless of how the book starts (solitary epub or epub+opf+cover), i always want the end result to be a single epub that contains the cover. one book, one file, all in.

so i load a book into calibre 2.13 and examine metadata & covers. i remove or clean up meta, blowing away ratings and other stuff so that i only keep the author, title, and series (if applicable). ALL other meta i deleted (supposedly). sometimes, the covers are ok but sometimes they're not, so i do a "download covers" and select an appropriate one from the options.

then, i do a "save to disk" with the following options: "save cover separately" and "separate opf" are UNchecked, but "update meta in saved copies" is checked.

if i then delete the book from the calibre library (but it stays in the saved directory) and i add that saved file back into calibre to verify - the cover is wrong. it's not the one i selected from the downloads. if i open that saved file in sigil, i can confirm that it's the wrong cover.

in some cases, tags that i blew away (isbn or ratings) are back.

i tried it with "update meta" UNchecked but that doesn't seem to make any difference.

i've just noticed this now, so i may have a few hundred epub files that have the wrong covers and extra tags, and i assume that if i redo my cleanup without changing how i do it, the files won't actually get cleaned up.

[theducks]

Why are you using such a convoluted scheme?

Polish and Modify EPUB can Add or Replace all those IN THE LIBRARY COPY, as well as do certain housecleaning without those gyrations AND not with the other side effects of a 'conversion'.

You need to make the configuration settings to match your personal preferences.

Each has slightly different options, so a look-see might be advised

[burnafterreading]

Originally Posted by theducks

Why are you using such a convoluted scheme?

Polish and Modify EPUB can Add or Replace all those IN THE LIBRARY COPY, as well as do certain housecleaning without those gyrations AND not with the other side effects of a 'conversion'.

You need to make the configuration settings to match your personal preferences.

Each has slightly different options, so a look-see might be advised

i don't think it's convoluted. basically, i want to have my own directory (that's NOT the calibre library because i hate now it stores the files in nested folders with ugly names and 3-files-per-book), and i want my final storage directory to be full of singular epubs. each epub would self-contained with the cover, cleaned up meta, etc. i prefer to simply drag-n-drop from whatever directory my ebooks are in into my reader. the same way as a book at your physical book store - the cover is part of the book, it's not a separate items that's on a separate shelf that you need to remember to grab along with the pages of the book.

i'm looking for a way to treat an epub the same way you treat a word document. you open it, make changes, and when you hit "save" it saves it WITH all the changes you made embedded into the saved file. it seems calibre saves the original file, but saves changes elsewhere, and that's preventing me from moving a simple epub around.

i just found a thread that says i may need to do a "convert epub->epub" before doing the "save to disk" so that it actually embeds the new meta/cover... ugh... only 996 files to potentially redo.

[Section8]

There is also an "embed metadata in book files" native calibre function that does this without all the saves.

[burnafterreading]

Originally Posted by Section8

There is also an "embed metadata in book files" native calibre function that does this without all the saves.

where??? i'm clicking through the various Preferences options and i'm not seeing it. i'm using calibre 2.13 with the default install (i just tweaked a few preferences that i could figure out). i don't see the option you're mentioning, and i don't see an option to polish. is it in some other view that i don't have?

i don't care much what happens to the source epub or calibre's library once i get my cleaned-up epub in a separate folder. the other stuff can happily get deleted. but sometimes the source is a single file, but other times it's a 3-file group, so i have the target as a separate directory on another drive. it's maybe one extra step to then go back to the sources and blow them away, but i don't mind that - as long as the final epub is cleaned with the meta as i prefer it and the cover i assigned.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by burnafterreading

where??? i'm clicking through the various Preferences options and i'm not seeing it. i'm using calibre 2.13 with the default install (i just tweaked a few preferences that i could figure out). i don't see the option you're mentioning, and i don't see an option to polish. is it in some other view that i don't have?

i don't care much what happens to the source epub or calibre's library once i get my cleaned-up epub in a separate folder. the other stuff can happily get deleted. but sometimes the source is a single file, but other times it's a 3-file group, so i have the target as a separate directory on another drive. it's maybe one extra step to then go back to the sources and blow them away, but i don't mind that - as long as the final epub is cleaned with the meta as i prefer it and the cover i assigned.

You need to use
Preferences: Toolbars and add that to a toolbar

EXISTING Toolbars are not updated when new features are added.

[burnafterreading]

Originally Posted by theducks

You need to use
Preferences: Toolbars and add that to a toolbar

EXISTING Toolbars are not updated when new features are added.

ah, thank you!!

it looks like it does most of the trick that i need! in the end, though, it doesn't blow away the "rating" setting so i'm still doing the "convert epub->epub" step and then saving to disk. it's an extra step but cleans up that last thing.

in the end, re-cleaning 990-plus files is not the death of me.

[BetterRed]

@burnafterreading - I do something similar for some friends & relatives, in essence here's what I what I do

• Add the book they send me (via email) to a scratch library
• Remove low value metadata (tags, rating, comments etc)
• Search for and download the best quality cover
• Modify the book (this is an optional plugin) with these settings, basically it strips out existing dross from the epub.
  
  
  
  
• Polish the book with these settings, this does a bit more 'tidying up' and adds the downloaded cover and updated metadata to the book.
  
• 
  
  Aside : some would argue that a Polish after a Modify is redundant, but I prefer to do both - typing 'Alt/M' (my kb short for Modify)and 'p' is easy enough, the software and scratch library live on an SSD so it only takes a few seconds.
• I then take a 'peek' at the book with the viewer to make sure it hasn't 'fallen apart', assuming it hasn't, I have a look at the embedded metadata via the blue 'i' button in the viewer - if anything is wrong I investigate & rectify
• Change Preferences->Save to disk to the relevant template
• Save to Disk (desktop)
• Remove the book from the scratch library
• Send the sanitised epub back as a reply to original email

BR

[burnafterreading]

ooh, nice. hope you don't mind if i (attempt to) borrow your approach and make my calibre do the same?

[eschwartz]

BetterRed,

One thing I notice about your setup, it doesn't seem to be redundant, specifically regarding metadata updates. Modify is stripping out non-dc metadata, and then Polish does the job of embedding new calibre metadata... so you still get the non-dc metadata that calibre generates??? I assume Modify would not do that on its own.
Plus Modify cannot strip junk CSS.

[theducks]

(Calibre) Series is non-dc metadata

do you really want to strip that?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

BetterRed,

One thing I notice about your setup, it doesn't seem to be redundant, specifically regarding metadata updates. Modify is stripping out non-dc metadata, and then Polish does the job of embedding new calibre metadata... so you still get the non-dc metadata that calibre generates??? I assume Modify would not do that on its own.
Plus Modify cannot strip junk CSS.

Or embed/subset fonts

I didn't mention those because they're a bit arcane

Originally Posted by theducks

(Calibre) Series is non-dc metadata

do you really want to strip that?

The Polish puts the calibre metadata back, including series.

The reason I strip the metadata back to dc elements only, is to get a clean slate without having to edit the epub.

BR