Metadata during directory add?

[jdege]

I have a new Color Nook, and a new installation of Caliber (on my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop), and I'm beginning to get my feet wet.

I had a couple directories full of PDFs of back-issues of some technical journals I read, and I did an "Add Books from Directories", for the first time. The import went fine, but the PDFs showed up without meaningful metadata.

I was able to identify the journals and set the metadata appropriately, but I have only about 100 books in Calibre - when that becomes thousands, searching through them all will become tedious.

Thinking about the problem, it seems to me that the obvious solution would be to specify metadata that should be applied to the books being imported, as they are being imported, in advance of the import.

Does anyone think this would be a useful feature? Or does it already exist, and I just missed it?

[user_none]

Metadata is read from the file. If it's nonexistant or incorrect there isn't much you can do other than import and correct. I would recommed importing in smaller batches and use the bulk metadata editor to set metadata that is the same across the batch (author for instance).

[Manichean]

Also, PDF metadata reading and writing can be notoriously difficult. If your metadata is present in the filename, use that option to read it during import- see preferences->adding books, deselect to read metadata from file content and create a regex according to your naming scheme.

[jdege]

Importing in smaller batches won't help, you'd still have to find the books you just imported among the thousands of books you've collected.

It'd be a lot easier to allow the user bring up the bulk metadata editor first, to specify metadata he wanted to apply to the books as they were being imported.

Or, if you could specify a tag that would be added to each book as it was being imported, when you began the import, you could use that tag to select the books you wanted to run the bulk metadata editor on.

Or if the books were tagged with the date and time of their import.

Absent something like this, there is no way to identify the books that were just imported, except by searching through all the books. And that will be impossible, once the number of books in the library begins to grow to a reasonable number.

I mean - most of the readers I know have a couple of thousand paper books in their house. I expect after a few years of reading ebooks, you'd quickly exceed that.

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by jdege

Or, if you could specify a tag that would be added to each book as it was being imported, when you began the import, you could use that tag to select the books you wanted to run the bulk metadata editor on.

See preferences->adding books, there's an option to add a tag when importing books.

Or if the books were tagged with the date and time of their import.

There's a date column (lookup name 'date') and a modified date column(lookup name 'last_modified').

[jdege]

Originally Posted by Manichean

Also, PDF metadata reading and writing can be notoriously difficult. If your metadata is present in the filename, use that option to read it during import- see preferences->adding books, deselect to read metadata from file content and create a regex according to your naming scheme.

I'm not talking about reading metadata from the file, or from the filename. I'm talking about adding metadata manually, when it can't be read from the file.

But thanks for pointing me to preferences->adding books. I seen an option - "Tags to apply when adding a book."

If I set this to "newly-added", I can then import a bunch of books, then select books with the "newly-added" tag, and use the bulk metadata editor to do what I need (and to remove the "newly-added" tag, so they don't show up the next time I do a bulk import.)

[itimpi]

The Date column in Calibre is set to the date that the book was added, so you can always sort on this field to see the most recently added books.

Having said that, adding a tag at the import stage to remind yourself that the metadata for this book needs review is a good idea. I use a TODO tag for this purpose.