Need help creating file structure hierarchy for 150k books

[secretclean]

Hello everyone. Over the past 8 years I've managed to collect over 150,000 non-fiction books, and I'd finally like to sort them all out.

It's incredibly daunting to click on root on my hard drive and see 21,947 folders and files strewn about with no universal naming structure. Some are in folders with "[author] title (file type) {uploader tag}", others are "title - genre (publisher, date)" and yet others are "title - author - file type" and aren't in folders at all. About half of my 150k books are in logical order thanks to whomever did all the work in compiling them before me, but I never took the time to merge between collections and now have a massive blob of nonsense.

My ideal file structure is to have them all sorted by genre (medical, history, art, etc.), then by subgenre if applicable (would probably have to manually sort that), then a simple "Title - Author (date)" for the file, no individual folders for each file. Though I've tried with calibre in the past, it never worked out well. Seems like there's always something missing in the metadata. Maybe I'm just too new and need guidance in using it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[BetterRed]

Calibre does not use the file system to manage ebook libraries, it uses a relational database, it uses the file system as as a place to keep book format files, cover image files, and metadata backup data.

I suggest you read the detailed explanation in the following sticky thread to get an appreciation of why a database is better tool for organising something like an ebook collection than a file system alone ==>> Want to change folder structure or file names in the Calibre library?

By default calibre only has 'columns' for the major elements of the Dublin Core spec, but via its custom column feature you can extend that in any way you want.

BR

[Adoby]

If you know a little about shell scripting then it is possible to write a script that renames all the files and add the names of the folders to the file name, with suitable separators. And copies the renamed files to a separate folder.

One problem might be that Windows may not like long file names, so avoid making the file names longer than the old file name with the path. Or this problem has perhaps been fixed in Windows? Or just do this in Linux...

When all the files have been renamed you can import them to a separate Calibre "repository" library and make sure to write file name to some custom tag.

After all this you can use the search and replace functions in Calibre to add tags and fix titles and author names to the books in the repository library. It will still be a lot of manual work. There are tools in Calibre that might help by extracting ISBN from inside books and download meta data and cover based on ISBN.

You might keep the repository and now and then search it and pull out a few books from there to add to your actual library. One author at a time, for instance. Or one specialized subject at a time. Or when you are researching something.

Fix tags and other meta data over time and move books to your main calibre library and make sure that it is perfect. Normalized!

You can create virtual libraries for each genre or subject. Or Year. Or first letter of the first author's middle name. Or based on publisher. Or all this at the same time. You can adopt some real library coding system. You just have to decide how you want to access the books. I use type of publication (periodical, fiction, nonfiction) as base for which library to use. And a simple genre tag after that. You can even have a sub genre tag if you want to.

At any time you can export your fine normalized Calibre library to some wonderful folder structure based on tags and other meta data. But over time I'm sure you will prefer to access the books from Calibre itself.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Adoby

[ . . . ]

When all the files have been renamed you can import them to a separate Calibre "repository" library and make sure to write file name to some custom tag.

[ . . . ]

There's a plugin that will automate populating custom columns with the location details of books when they're added, see ==>> GetFileName.

BR