Using Calibre for Something Other Than Ebooks?

[toomuchreading]

I'm curious as to the different ways Calibre is being utilized for other things than ebook management.
What are you using Calibre for if not for ebook management? How are you accomplishing it?
I'm curious to see the different ways Calibre is being used, besides ebook management. Calibre is a fantastic product. It will be interesting to see what people are doing with it.

Thanks everyone for help satisfying my curiosity.

[eschwartz]

I use the OverDrive Link plugin for calibre as my library ebooks wishlist. Still ebooks, but definitely not management.

[dickloraine]

I use it for audio books and comics. If I have an audio book only as mp3s I convert them with foobar to m4b and attach it to the book, if I own it, or make a new entry if not. I have a virtual library for them and I display a custom icon beside the book.

[BetterRed]

scanned vintage comics, journals, 'scholarly articles', some personal photo and video collections and a small collection of games. The one thing I don't use it for is music.

I have audio files for some 'books' - mainly mp3's ripped from 'talking heads' tv video's - charlie rose et al, for some programs its also possible to get the transcript.

BR

[toomuchreading]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

some personal photo and video collections and a small collection of games. The one thing I don't use it for is music.
BR

Neat. How do you save the photo's, games and video's into Calibre?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by toomuchreading

Neat. How do you save the photo's, games and video's into Calibre?

First, I use Windows, so some of what follows may be specific to that OS, but any OS/X and Linux differences can probably be addressed with trivial scripts. Second, I do not use calibre to integrate with external devices, for books or anything else. So I only use calibre to organise stuff and for ebook conversion, editing etc. Third, I do not keep anything that calibre uses on network drives - i.e. configuration or library folders.

For personal photos & videos I have a separate Library.

• I keep 'albums' of photos in cbz files. An album is just a collection of images, usually they're from a particular event. I don't need to categorise or tag individual photos. I put the year and month into Author and an event name into Title - eg 2013-02 - Beijing Trip. I view the photos with a couple of comic viewers - my current favourite is HoneyView. I create the cbz files by zipping up a folder of images, with an extension of .cbz which I then drag/drop into calibre. Once they're in the calibre library and its been backed up (daily local, and weekly off-site) I delete the original image folders.
  
• For the videos I just add the video files (these days mainly MP4). Images and videos are often in the same folder.
  
  So the Libraries/MyMedia/2013-02/Beijing Trip (127) folder has Beijing Trip - 2013-02.cbz, and Beijing Trip - 2013-02.mp4 files, plus the metadata.opf and cover.jpg file. I make the cover.jpg from a blended image collage, that I put at the top of the cbz.

For games I also have a separate library

• I put a shortcut (.lnk) to the game into my calibre Games library. Again its just a method or organising things and to have a consistent catalogue.
  
• I'm not much of a game player, just have a few old ones lying around some of which have 'fixed locations' I was accessing them via desktop shortcuts. All I did was create a Games Library, then I added the desktop shortcuts to that library via Windows Send To - which is just another way of running the «calibre "some silly game.lnk"» command. Then I deleted the desktop shortcuts - Yay.

I also add video and audio files to 'books'.

You can put just about any file type into a calibre book folder via the Add files to selected book records option.

• The only types I can recall having problems with are
  
  
  • some .exe files, I never figured out why some were OK and not others;
  • shortcut (.lnk) files, If you try to put a shortcut file into calibre via Add files..., Windows will jump to do its job and action the shortcut :lol: So they must be added via the calibre command - which is simple if you pop a vanilla shortcut to the calibre.exe into your Send To folder.
• I tend to use the Send To method more than the Add files... method, it does mean that I sometimes have to merge what I just sent with an existing 'book' - but I find that easier than fiddling around with the Add files... option and the Windows open file dialogue.

The only 'problem' with all that, is that is that I use the Author and Title columns for other things - e.g. my journal library has the journal name as the Author and the journal date/issue number etc as the Title. I don't have a problem with that, but I appreciate some people wouldn't like it. If I had everything in a single library then I probably wouldn't like it either.

The only real annoyance is that I have to change the author_sort_copy_method tweak for different libraries, I should find a way to automate that or at least popup a reminder.

BR