HELP! Moving Meta-data between libraries

[Xenophon]

I've made a mistake that I could use some help recovering from. I was helping my wife get our entire Calibre library onto her laptop. Because she already had a bunch of books in Calibre on her laptop, I had her do a big recursive "Add Books" of the files in the Calibre library on the upstairs server. She now has all the books, but a bunch of the meta-data is hosed.

After some thought, I had a forehead-slapping moment when I realized the cause of the problem. When you edit meta-data in Calibre, only the database changes; the modified meta-data is not written to the individual book files. This means that I just had her import the latest-and-greatest lrf files, but NOT the updated meta-data.

Now she's got authors with typos, no series information, missing book summaries, etc. The books themselves are fine but the meta-data is hosed.

My question is this: How can I get the improved meta-data exported from my library and imported to hers?

My first thought was to delete the books we just added (using sort by date to find them), save-to-disk the entire library on the server, and then do yet another recursive add of the books from the server. This has the problem that Libby doesn't want to risk losing any books she already had before today's recursive addition of books -- and some of those prior books were also added today. So this approach got shot down.

My second thought was to ask the assembled brains here whether there is some way I can export meta-data upstairs and import it downstairs. I'm perfectly willing to use the command-line if necessary. Suggestions, anyone?

Xenophon

[kovidgoyal]

If the two computers have the same operating system, you can just copy the entire library folder to the client computer and then run calibre on it once with the --with-library command line switch. It will then use the new library on subsequent restarts