CWA creates extremely long book folder names – can I limit or customize them?

[Thomase004]

Hi everyone,

I'm running Calibre-Web Automated (CWA) in Docker on my Synology NAS.

My setup:

• ⁠CWA running in Docker
• ⁠Calibre library mounted at /calibre-library
• ⁠RAW import folder mounted at /cwa-book-ingest
• ⁠Books are automatically imported from the RAW folder

I've imported around 478 books so far. Everything works fine in CWA itself, but I'm having problems when I try to manage the library and change the metadata in CWA or using the Calibre desktop application on my Windows PC.

The problem:

Calibre creates a separate folder for each book inside the author's folder. The folder name is based on the book title and its ID.

Some titles are extremely long, resulting in very long folder and file paths. For example:

\\Nasii\Medien\books\calibre-library\Eco, Umberto\Vier moralische Schriften - Mit der Intoleranz leben_ - An der Schwelle zum nachsten Jahrtausen (377)\Vier moralische Schriften - Mit der Intole - Eco, Umberto.epub

I can´t change the metada in the Calibre app (OSError:[WinError 123] but I could change it in CWA. BUT the bit problem is here, the epub will be deleted after a refresh.

Interestingly, even when I put a file with a very short filename (just 4–5 characters) into the RAW import folder, CWA still creates a folder with the full, extremely long book title.

So it seems to use the title from the embedded book metadata rather than the original filename.

My questions:

1. ⁠Is there a way to configure CWA or Calibre to use shorter folder names when importing books?
2. ⁠Can the maximum length of book folder names be limited?
3. ⁠Is it possible to use shorter internal folder names while keeping the full book title in the metadata?

I don't mind having to manually correct titles, authors, covers and other metadata afterwards. My main goal is simply to avoid excessively long file paths for future imports.

I'd prefer a solution that doesn't require manually renaming folders or modifying the existing library.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

—-

At the moment I can’t customize these books in the long named folders … could Calibre App change/cut folder names?

[BetterRed]

Calibre Web and its forks (e.g. the Automated variant) are not part of the calibre e-book library management application. For your particular issue you need to read the following:

Want to change folder structure or file names in the Calibre library?

Why doesn’t calibre let me store books in my own folder structure?

There are dozens of threads with dozens of replies in this sub-forum on this topic (change folder and file names), the answer is always the same - no you can't.

Ask the CWA developer to stop injecting confected subtitles into the book title - i.e. "Vier moralische Schriften" is good enough, see ==>> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...sche_Schriften).

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Also you cannot share calibre library folders across operating systems, you will get data loss, different filename length limits are just one issue you will find.

[Thomase004]

Thanks for your replies.

If there’s no way to limit the number of lines in CWA, do you have any idea how I can edit the books that are in a folder with a long name and also have long names themselves?

I always get an error message in the Calibre app ... OSError:[WinError 123

I copied my database into a text file, and some of the entries there are very long.

I’d upload the books again, but they keep showing up with such long names.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

[Sirtel]

You can set calibre to get the title from the filename, not the metadata. See Preferences -> Adding books.