Deleting Duplicates

[mystory]

Hi, I'm a newbie. Can anyone tell me if there is an easy way to delete duplicates without going through the list and deleting each on seperately.

Thank you for any help received.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by mystory

Hi, I'm a newbie. Can anyone tell me if there is an easy way to delete duplicates without going through the list and deleting each on seperately.

Thank you for any help received.

@mystory - the Find Duplicates [GUI Plugin] is made to do just that

And this thread may be relevant too ==>> Using "Delete Duplicates" Plugin

BR

[mystory]

I am using the Find Duplicates plugin. This presents me with a list of over 1000 books. Some are the same book twice, some 3 or even 4 times, although some are in different formats. Is there a quick way to delete the extra ones or is it a case of going down the list and deleting them manually.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by mystory

I am using the Find Duplicates plugin. This presents me with a list of over 1000 books. Some are the same book twice, some 3 or even 4 times, although some are in different formats. Is there a quick way to delete the extra ones or is it a case of going down the list and deleting them manually.

Ever hear the term 'Auto-Incorrect'?
That is what you would have a 100% chance of happening to many entries.

1K of erroneous entries?
I suspect you did not use enough care matching the 'Add' mode to the source location (or the source location looks like my garage, any stuff just added to the stacks ).

You need to look at each duplicate group (of records. There is a FD PI mode so that you can only see 1 group at a time) and make a decision based upon what you see (some times using 'V' (view) to look at a version.
Sometimes:
1)You delete a poor version
2)Merge the formats together
3)Adjust the Author/Title/Series (this is not used by FD, but why not fix an seen error )
4)Ignore (false positive)

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by mystory

Is there a quick way to delete the extra ones or is it a case of going down the list and deleting them manually.

• Install Find Duplicates extension;
• Select Find Book Duplicates;
• Select Binary Compare;
• Click on OK;
• When it is finished running, sort the library by size, and delete everything that has a file size of 0;
• Anything left is either a different file format, or a different edition of the work;
• Caveat: You may lose important metadata going this route;

[mystory]

What I did in fact was to create a new empty library then added books to it from the folder containing the original library. This prevented duplicates being added.

[LadyKate]

When I first put my library in Calibre I had something like 3000 duplicates showing. As the library was over 30000 records, that was not unexpected.

To narrow it down started with first looking for identical (binary) which was an automatic delete one of them.

Then looked for identical author, identical title and chose the best formatted OR if it was two differing formats which I wanted to keep both of added a note to explain why (for instance two different translations of the same book).

That should reduce the duplicate records to a manageable number which you can go through at your leisure. It took me about two months of an hour here, an hour there to clean up my duplicates completely.