Question about creating a PDF library in Calibre

[kaufman]

I currently have use Calibre to manage my ePubs. I also have a library of 700 PDFs, that I currently organize out of Calibre by putting them in a folders hierarchy on the disk.

I would like to bring them into Calibre, but I dread the thought of adding titles and authors to 700 files. Ideally I would also like to tag them based on the folder, but that is much less onerous, since its only about 20 different folders.

Is there something built into Calibre that will parse PDFs for metadata, or perhaps some sort of plugin? Is there some other way to do this that I am not thinking of?

Thanks.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by kaufman

I currently have use Calibre to manage my ePubs. I also have a library of 700 PDFs, that I currently organize out of Calibre by putting them in a folders hierarchy on the disk.

I would like to bring them into Calibre, but I dread the thought of adding titles and authors to 700 files. Ideally I would also like to tag them based on the folder, but that is much less onerous, since its only about 20 different folders.

Is there something built into Calibre that will parse PDFs for metadata, or perhaps some sort of plugin? Is there some other way to do this that I am not thinking of?

Thanks.

If the title /author is part of the filename, just change the Add Books setting for the duration.

If the folder structure is the metadata, then you will need to use something like the Metmorphose (sp?) to rename the file first

[chaley]

(Building on theducks answer ...)

Calibre can extract some metadata from a book's file name. It uses the last file name, not any folder above that name in the hierarchy. Tags appears not to be one of the metadata fields, but there might be a way around that.

The first thing to do would be to name the PDFs in some regular way so that you can parse the metadata components from the file name. You might consider using a bulk renamer to recover the metadata from parent folder names. The only rules are "be consistent" and "make separators obvious". Something like

title -!- authors -!- series -!- series index.pdf

would work. It would be best if null fields such as series and series index still had their markers.

You could then extend the scheme by adding the tags and extracting them into the publisher field (for example). Then use global search & replace to move the information from publisher to tags.

Putting it together, your file names might look like

The Origin of Zound -!- John Doe & Jane Smith -!- Origins -!- 1 -!- parody, non fiction, whatever.pdf

You would build the appropriate regular expression and put it in Preferences / Adding books.

Watch out for max path lengths.

[kovidgoyal]

If your PDFs already have correct metadata in them, just add them to calibre, the emtadata will be read automatically.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by kaufman

I currently have use Calibre to manage my ePubs. I also have a library of 700 PDFs, that I currently organize out of Calibre by putting them in a folders hierarchy on the disk.

I would like to bring them into Calibre, but I dread the thought of adding titles and authors to 700 files. Ideally I would also like to tag them based on the folder, but that is much less onerous, since its only about 20 different folders.

Is there something built into Calibre that will parse PDFs for metadata, or perhaps some sort of plugin? Is there some other way to do this that I am not thinking of?

Thanks.

@kaufman - if a PDF a) contains no useful metadata (as is often the case - looking at you Neely Kroes) or their current file names are not amenable for the gleaning of metadata via a regex... but it does have its ISBN 'printed' in the first few pages, then you could use [GUI Plugin] Extract ISBN to do what it does, and then download the metadata from the usual places.

BR