Getting metadata from CC into calibre?

[turpato]

Hello!

Background: I am using calibre 5.22 on a Mac (Monterey 12.0 beta) and Calibre Companion 5.4.4.19 (410) on a 2019 Fire tablet.

I had put together a library of about 18,000 items in calibre. I added a custom hierarchical tag-type column and used it to assign a "topic" to each item in the library, so that I could look for a book on a given subject without necessarily knowing the title/author of the book. I added all of these items, custom column information included, to Calibre Companion on the Fire tablet, stored on a micro SD card, and I was able to sort/group everything by the information in the "topic" column. All of this took what would probably be considered by most people, to put it mildly, "an *excruciatingly* long time." But finally it was done, and all was well, and I was really quite pleased with my little library.

Then, in attempting to do a smart thing (clearing enough space on an external drive, where I had partial collections of most of the files, so that I could back up said 18,000+ item calibre library all in one place), I did a very, very dumb thing: thinking I was looking at the external drive's contents, but actually looking at my computer's own contents, I deleted the *originals* from my computer, emptying the Trash periodically as I went along, getting through about 3/4 of the titles before realizing what I had actually done.

(For the record, yes, all of that was a very big mistake! It is genuinely the dumbest single thing I have ever done, in my entire life, and I have no explanation for how it came to be. Transient complete absence of consciousness, I guess. )

Aghast upon realizing what I'd done, I immediately stopped, and copied the whole lot from the Fire's micro SD card onto an external drive. I then set up a new calibre library, re-created a "topics" column, and imported those files into the library. The basic information (title, author) for the books showed up as expected, but not the information for the "topics" column.

The "good news" is that in all this, I don't think I actually lost any books, because the vast majority were on the aforementioned Fire tablet, and those that weren't there were on a second tablet. And all the "topics" information continues to display in CC. I have since sent new books to CC on the tablet, from a subsequently-created calibre library, and this has remained true. In fact, I have assigned "topics" information to the new books in the new calibre library as well, and they fit right in with the same existing structure in CC.

Additionally: if I transfer a book from CC on the tablet to calibre on my computer (connected as a wireless device), the "topics" information goes along with them, and fills in the proper column just as it did when I originally set it up. What I am really, really hoping is that there might be some way to export the "topics" information (maybe a catalog of the items/their metadata in CC?) all at once, and get it back into calibre, accompanying the corresponding books.

So while it does seem I *can* get everything back into a calibre library by sending them from CC to my computer, for 18,000+ items, many of them quite large, it would take an awfully long time. As far as my ability to guesstimate informs me, manually re-assigning the "topics" information to each of 18,000+ items would probably take about the same amount of time. While none of any of this is really the end of the world, if it's possible to save myself a great deal of time, I figured it was worth asking about. To me, it seems like it *might* be a fairly straightforward thing to accomplish, but not knowing enough to actually get it done, I realize that assessment is... not based in a whole lot.

Anyway! In conclusion: if you have any suggestions as to how I might accomplish this, I would be very appreciative indeed! Thank you for reading.

[Deskisamess]

CC has been abandoned by the current owner.

[turpato]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

CC has been abandoned by the current owner.

I am asking if someone in the overall forum community might know how to do what I'm interested in, or has any suggestions about getting existing metadata within the app back into Calibre.

[theducks]

AFAIK it only sends Date READ (finished) if configured

[BetterRed]

Try asking chaley - it might possible to extract from a CC database into a CSV file and use it to as input into the "Import List" calibre plugin.

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Try asking chaley - it might possible to extract from a CC database into a CSV file and use it to as input into the "Import List" calibre plugin.

BR

That isn't possible at least with CC as I left it some time back.

There is one possible way if you are willing to process a JSON file to extract the information into something that import list can deal with. The CC wireless device keeps a cache of the books on the device to avoid sending metadata that hasn't changed. That cache file is a JSON encoded array of book metadata containing all standard and custom column data. It is located in |Users|**name**\AppData\Local\calibre-cache named wireless_device_......

This thread discusses something similar.