Populating Calibre With Books

[billbruen]

I can't see in Help exactly how Calibre finds books.

I assume it must trundle through your drives searching, but does it handle portable external drives as well and if so, how many?....and how does it identify a PDF as a 'book'?

I have 4 internal drives in my PC and 5 external USB drives....will it search all of these? There doesn't appear to be any notification of where the search has been and exactly what has been found......

I have tried Calibre before but found, especially when it came to PDF files, it picked up a lot of garbage which were not 'books'.

Is there a way to filter PDF's in a sensible way, to try and isolate 'books'?

As a broader question, does anyone know of a utility which will search all your drives for books and allow you to consolidate the results in a particular folder or drive?

I guess this would be replicating what Calibre does, but I have so many files all over the place, and so many PDF's, I feel it would help Calibre if I did my own find/sort and fine tune the books, before letting Calibre loose to construct its database.

[kovidgoyal]

calibre does not search your computer for books. You tell it what books to add via the add books button or by drag and drop of book files onto the book list.