How do I rename a library?

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Well, this mean old bat didn't find it so easy. I closed calibre and renamed the folder. When I reopened calibre, the listing for the old library name was still there. I linked the new library name then opened it and it had everything the old one had in it. I opened the old library name and it showed nothing. I went to the folder and folders with both the old folders and the renamed one were there. The old one was empty except for the metadata file. Weird. I deleted the old one, then reopened calibre, went into preferences and opened the configuration directory, the closed calibre. I edited out the old library name from the history.plist and closed it. I reopened calibre and the misbegotten old library name was still there. I clicked on it and calibre locked up. I couldn't get rid of it with Windows Task Manager so I had to do a reboot to clear things up (in all fairness, I have been doing some massive file transfers, editing, etc. the past few days, so it was past due for a reboot). Once rebooted, I checked the folder where I keep my e-books and the old folder was still gone. I opened calibre and the old folder name was still there. This time, when I clicked on the old filename, I got a window saying calibre couldn't find the old folder and would delete the entry, which is what I wanted.

There has to be an easier way!

Jeannie, I didn't get a chance to try this immediately, we went out of town yesterday afternoon, and I was too tired to do it when I got back. So basically I filed yours and itimpi's answers under "Oh good, now I know how to do it and will do it later" but didn't actually DO it.
Sounds like it gave you fits, so I may just live with the old one popping up in the menu unless Kovid or someone feels like doing something about it. I *think* what I did the first time that happened (I only had I think four books inputted at the time) was just wiped it and deleted the whole thing, created a new library named the right thing, and started in there. The "old" listing is still showing up, however. I'll try Kovid's way to get rid of that after I'm a little more awake. If I try it now (with two sips of diet Dr Pepper as my total caffeine intake for the day), I will mess something up so badly I'll have to reinstall Calibre and lose ALL my libraries, and then you'll be hearing from me in the Vent and Rant thread!

[Adoby]

I am almost afraid to ask, but ...

Why do you want more than one calibre library? I have never felt the need. Maybe I am missing something clever?

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Adoby

I am almost afraid to ask, but ...

Why do you want more than one calibre library? I have never felt the need. Maybe I am missing something clever?

The reason I implemented this feature was because I often have to debug/test things, add random books, delete books, bulk edit stuff, try new features, too disruptive on my personal library, so I made a test library and found I wanted a more convenient way to switch between the two.

For a long time, I just let it slide (I would simply use the Preferences to change libraries) but the recent re-organization of the toolbar/location bar meant that I had to add a button to show the number of books in the library and switching/creating new libraries was a natural fit for this button

I have to confess I had no idea so many people were waiting to pounce on this feature. Like you, I don't really see the point in having multiple libraries, apart from corner cases, like mine.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by irrationalJohn

While it no doubt seems like a simple and fool proof procedure to you, you are after all the developer and thus not completely objective.

As someone already mentioned above, this does not always work reliably. Sometimes ... and I have no idea when or why ... Calibre does not remove the reference to the old library. Instead an "empty" database is created in the "old" directory.

To approach this from another direction, if it's so "simple", why not just add "Rename Library" and "Delete Library" functions to Calibre? How hard could it be?

-irrational john

Methinks itimpi may have hit upon the problem. In the future I will try changing libraries before changing the name of it. Options to delete and change the name of libraries would be nice.

Don't be so hard on Kovid. There are thousands of configurations out there and it is impossible to anticipate every one that might intoduce an element of wonkiness to an otherwise simple process. Or, as is possible in this case, have a normally desireable feature sneak up and bite one in the backside when implementing another feature. Calibre is still being developed and there will be rocky moments in its development. At least, once a problem is identified, the fix usually comes in a week or two instead of the year or more I've seen with high priced commercial programs.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Adoby

I am almost afraid to ask, but ...

Why do you want more than one calibre library? I have never felt the need. Maybe I am missing something clever?

The reason I'm using three libraries is I have three genres of books in which each one would work best with different custom columns than the other two. I'm scanning all my songbooks (well over a hundred) but will want to list them in calibre as individual songs instead of as complete books (but still reference them as being from a particular songbook) to aid in searching for songs. This would have been extremely difficult to integrate with the rest of my books and would have resulted in more custom columns than I would have cared for cluttering up even a 22" widescreen monitor. Having a separate library for the songbooks simplified that. I could have gotten away with having comics in with the rest of my books but since it is now so easy to have multiple libraries, I went ahead and made a library for them.

Another reason someone may want two libraries if two people share a computer and separately own books they would not want to have lumped into a single library.

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by Adoby

I am almost afraid to ask, but ...

Why do you want more than one calibre library? I have never felt the need. Maybe I am missing something clever?

In my case it's because I'm OCD. Like Jeannie, I have several different genres of books. I don't like sorting them with tags, so I have separate libraries for genres. I know this makes lots of people go "ICK" and "why????" but since Kovid was kind enough to implement the feature, I'm darned sure going to use it! Even if he didn't mean for it to be used for this purpose, it works for me admirably, so I'm really glad it's there.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by phenomshel

In my case it's because I'm OCD. Like Jeannie, I have several different genres of books. I don't like sorting them with tags, so I have separate libraries for genres. I know this makes lots of people go "ICK" and "why????" but since Kovid was kind enough to implement the feature, I'm darned sure going to use it! Even if he didn't mean for it to be used for this purpose, it works for me admirably, so I'm really glad it's there.

I have umpteen genres I could have made separate libraries for but it's so easy to search them out, making separate libraries, splitting them into sub-genre's, etc., not too mention that many books can be classed in more than one genre, so I'll just let calibre do its job (which it does quite well). But my songbooks and sheet music are radically different from regular books since they all will be treated as sheet music so it made sense to have a separate library for them. Even though comic books will work in the main book library, they just don't seem to fit with books so I made them separate (the comics are my OCD moment). I took advantage of that to utilize more suitable columns.

However, different strokes for different folks (pardon the cliche) so whatever works for people is just fine.

I'm debating on if I should put my magazines in calibre or not. Since a TOC (possibly in the form of tags) for each one would be needed, it would get pretty hairy in one heckuva a hurry. They would need their own library. Since a lot of thought will have to go into how to pull it off and a lot of time would be needed to implement it, that project will have to wait until I've completed others. Besides, calibre may have new features by then that will make the job easier (or I'll just learn how to better utilize existing features).

I also have a lot of tech tips I have stored in Word docs and PDFs. I'm using Windows folder and file tree to organize them but there are a lot of duplicates due to many of them fitting under more than one category. Calibre would be ideal for corralling and organizing them and would facilitate searching. They would be a candidate for their own library. Again, that is project that will have to keep for later.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

...Like you, I don't really see the point in having multiple libraries, apart from corner cases, like mine.

You never realized your program was versatile?

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Like you, I don't really see the point in having multiple libraries, apart from corner cases, like mine.

I suspect there are some people who will use it rather than tags and will miss out on many of the advantages of an integrated single library. Still, different strokes and all that.

After Kovid implemented the Copy to Library feature, someone asked for that feature to honor the autosort/automerge flag for books with similar author/titles. I spent a chunk of time writing that code on Saturday, even though I doubt I'll use it.

For those who have multiple libraries, however, I hope it will prove to be useful.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

You never realized your program was versatile?

People are always surprising me with the things they do with calibre.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

People are always surprising me with the things they do with calibre.

Heck, it even does Windows.

[Adoby]

I now realize that I don't miss out on something very clever by not using the multiple library feature. I can finally relax and start reading again.

Edit: But I quicḱly started to worry again...

We now have the ability to switch between libraries. I suspect that Kovid at some point would like to avoid testing this using the set of libraries that includes the library he uses for his personal reading. So we might perhaps expect a feature where we can choose between more than one set of libraries. A reading set and perhaps several debug sets. At the click of a button you get another list of libraries.

Just imagine the amount of threads with questions that could lead to.

And there really is no need to stop there. We might later want to choose between different groups of sets of libraries. And so on...

[simonzed]

In our family, everyone has their own library, but as I'm the geek - that's 4 in all, it comes to me to manage the details. And this means every now and then I need to rename a library. But I'll try the folder renaming thing and see how that works...

Oops, found the renaming function on another thread. Works perfectly!

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=264946

[d2produce]

Originally Posted by Adoby

I am almost afraid to ask, but ...

Why do you want more than one calibre library? I have never felt the need. Maybe I am missing something clever?

When you have over 1 million books in your collection you may need more than 1 library. Why scroll through endless Menus's and sit around all day for thousands upon tens of thousands of books to process when .... BOOM Horror books......all ready to go.......BOOM Crime books.... There's no point in having 1 books database unless you only have under 100 books in there otherwise you'll spend more time scrolling and searching than actually READING. And the Online share feature? If I tried scrolling on my phone or tablet in a 1.3 Million book library I wouldn't make it out of the # section let alone get to A after 100 swipes. There'd be a permanent grove etched into my phone from the WEAR. So ya I can't see how anyone WOULDN'T have/want/need multiple libraries unless they have an EXTREMELY small collection.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by d2produce

When you have over 1 million books in your collection you may need more than 1 library. Why scroll through endless Menus's and sit around all day for thousands upon tens of thousands of books to process when .... BOOM Horror books......all ready to go.......BOOM Crime books.... There's no point in having 1 books database unless you only have under 100 books in there otherwise you'll spend more time scrolling and searching than actually READING. And the Online share feature? If I tried scrolling on my phone or tablet in a 1.3 Million book library I wouldn't make it out of the # section let alone get to A after 100 swipes. There'd be a permanent grove etched into my phone from the WEAR. So ya I can't see how anyone WOULDN'T have/want/need multiple libraries unless they have an EXTREMELY small collection.

Are you serious that you have 1.3million eBooks?