Touch How To Remove Book Covers

[TheArtfulDodger]

Hello:

Although I constantly remove books from my Kobo Touch, the available space never goes up! I understand this is because deleting a book does not delete the book's cover (strange!) so there must be a cover for every book I've ever had on the Touch!

My question: How do I remove book covers that I don't need on the Touch? Or, for that matter, can I remove them?

I am sure this has been discussed before, but I can't find it so, if necessary, please redirect me to the correct thread.

Thanks in advance.

Sparky

[PeterT]

If you use calibre, the Kobo Utilities plugin can handle this.

[WS64]

If you don't use hacks which need images to start them you can simply delete the complete images folder .kobo-images

[PeterT]

@WS64: I don't think any of the hacks placed their images in the .kobo-images directory structure

[WS64]

No, not the hacks. But if you have a hack installed and go to the library and the library wants the thumbnail of one of these hack-pictures and the thumbnail is not there Nickel will process the picture. And as soon as Nickel touches the picture the action behind the picture will start (like starting an application). This will in the worst case lead to an unresponsive reader.
You can always access the device again by plugin in to a computer before rebooting and then deleting either the hack directory or the offending picture, but this might be difficult. I would NOT touch the images folder as long as you have hacks on the device which will be started through pictures.

[davidfor]

As PeterT said, the Kobo Utilities plugin has a function to find and remove any orphaned cover images. But, there shouldn't be many. Deleting a book through the device has always removed the images for me. The same goes when using calibre to remove a book. I'm not sure what happens if you delete a book from the file system, but I am fairly sure the cover images will be removed when the device detects this has happened.

When do you think the cover images are not being removed?

[TheArtfulDodger]

Hello:

I show that I have 1,050 books on my Kobo but the /.kobo-images folder shows 1,595 files!

However, Kobo Utilities said that only 8 images were excess, yet again there was no difference in the available space!.

So, I moved 125 books from the Kobo to a 16GB micro SD card and the amount of spare space still didn't change! So, how is that possible?

Can someone tell me what the KoboReader.sqlite file is - it is almost 128 MB!

Any information anyone can provide will be much appreciated.

Sparky

[GeoffR]

There are usually 3 or 4 cover images per book, depending on firmware version. All of these are removed when you remove the book.

However there are also cover images associated with recommendations, and there is no option on the device to remove recommendations. But you can remove them using Calibre: Tick the "show recommendations" box in the KoboTouch driver configuration, and then use Calibre's remove book function.

Edit: There might also be other images in the .kobo-images directory from books that have the "Beyond the Book" feature enabled, and from awards, related books, wishlist books, etc.

[PeterT]

Preview books also have images.

The sqlite file is the database where Kobo store ALL the info on what books are on your device.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by TheArtfulDodger

Hello:

I show that I have 1,050 books on my Kobo but the /.kobo-images folder shows 1,595 files!

However, Kobo Utilities said that only 8 images were excess, yet again there was no difference in the available space!.

As GeoffR said, there are multiple versions of the cover for each book. But, the device generates them as needed. Depending on what you have done with the book, there might not be any cover images, or there might be up to four. If you use calibre to send covers with the books, there should be all four versions of the cover. But, with those counts, you aren't doing that.

The .kobo-images directory only has covers for books on the main memory. This includes sideloaded books, books downloaded from Kobo and recommendations from Kobo.

Any time I have found a problem with extra covers, it is usually the recommendations. And something else usually has gone wrong. When I read your thread, I ran the cover check on my Glo. There were about 100 extras. All where covers for Kobos. I believe they were left behind after I restored a database from a few days before. This would have left orphaned images for recommendations that were not in the database.

So, I moved 125 books from the Kobo to a 16GB micro SD card and the amount of spare space still didn't change! So, how is that possible?

Can someone tell me what the KoboReader.sqlite file is - it is almost 128 MB!

As PeterT said, the database contains details about every book on the device. There is at least two rows per book. Plus one for each entry in the TOC for epubs and PDF and two for each TOC entry in a kepub. Some of these rows have a lot of information. For example, the full synopsis in in one of them. That can be a few KB. For curiosity, I pulled all the rows out for a kepub once. The was about 75KB of data for that one book. That didn't include any database overhead (indexes etc) or bookmarks or Beyond-The-Book entries.

But, 128MB seems big. I have about 1200 books and mine is about 24MB. The Kobo Utilities plugin mentioned has a database compress option. This might reduce size, but not always.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by davidfor

As PeterT said, the database contains details about every book on the device. There is at least two rows per book. Plus one for each entry in the TOC for epubs and PDF and two for each TOC entry in a kepub. Some of these rows have a lot of information. For example, the full synopsis in in one of them. That can be a few KB. For curiosity, I pulled all the rows out for a kepub once. The was about 75KB of data for that one book. That didn't include any database overhead (indexes etc) or bookmarks or Beyond-The-Book entries.

But, 128MB seems big. I have about 1200 books and mine is about 24MB. The Kobo Utilities plugin mentioned has a database compress option. This might reduce size, but not always.

At my current ~2100 books, the database is hitting 153MB. This growth seems pretty linear as I've added more books. I do use Calibre to grab the metadata for each new book which adds to the database size.

This is about 4 days after a factory reset, prior to the factory reset, the database was close to 159MB.

Regards,
David

[93terp]

Originally Posted by DNSB

At my current ~2100 books, the database is hitting 153MB. This growth seems pretty linear as I've added more books. I do use Calibre to grab the metadata for each new book which adds to the database size.

This is about 4 days after a factory reset, prior to the factory reset, the database was close to 159MB.

Regards,
David

Holy crap, something must be really wrong on my Aura HD as I have ~ 800 books (ePub-->kepub using Kobo Extended plugin), and my database is over 200MB!

[WS64]

Just for the record, when I last used Nickel the DB on my Mini was over 300MB (a few thousand books).
Thanks to Start Menu and Koreader I don't have to worry about these things anymore!