Disappointed in organization options

[rchiav]

I've been trying to find a way to accomplish what I'm looking to do but it doesn't seem like Calibre is structured to work this way. What I'd like to be able to do is organize and separate ebooks that are imported into Calibre so I can distinguish which ebooks I've done what to, and which I'm done converting, editing, etc.

What would be really nice is if when you imported books, you could import them into a folder within Calibre instead of all ebooks showing up in the same view. The only thing that looks like it would come close is adding tags, but that's a tedious process where you'd have to find the books after the fact and then edit the meta data.. and then edit the meta data again when you're done editing the meta data. Also to me, the meta data should be about the content of the book, not about where the book is in your workflow.

Am I missing something or is there really no way to manage and organize where you are within your workflow from within Calibre, other then leveraging metadata tags?

[theducks]

Welcome to our group.

Tags for each class You can add/remove in the Metadata editor or Bulk editor

Then use the "Luggage tag" to help set a filtered view.

[Worldwalker]

The tags work really well for that, actually. Here's how I do it:

1. Before I add new books, I select all my existing books (control-A) and use bulk edit to add a tag named PROCESSED. calibre takes maybe 20 seconds to go through my thousands of books and tag them all.

2. I add my new books as usual.

3. I go to tag view and click twice on the PROCESSED tag so it only shows those books that do not have that tag -- i.e., my just-added books.

4. I do any needed editing, conversion, etc. As I finish each book, I give it a PROCESSED tag (generally at the same time as I'm adding whatever other tags the book needs).

5. If there are more batches of new books to add, repeat steps 2-4.

6. Finally, when I'm done adding books, control-A to select all books once again, and bulk edit to remove the PROCESSED tag.

All done.

By tagging the books you don't need to work on before you start work, "finding the books after the fact" becomes easy.

Remember that calibre is the creation of a guy named Kovid, not a development team of hundreds at Microsoft. Kovid is a genius, and there are other people contributing to the project, but it's still a volunteer effort being done by a small number of people. There are a lot of things people want calibre to be able to do, and a very limited amount of manpower available to do them. When there is a practical way to do something with the existing features, building another way to do that thing has to take a lower priority than adding the new features that people like me are clamoring for. The "purity of purpose" of metadata is less important, under these circumstances, than the requested features that calibre doesn't have at all.

Try my way of doing it; you'll find that it works very well, and after you've used it for a while (I have processed over 2,000 books with that system) you might find that you don't need another mechanism after all.

Incidentally, I don't know much about the Nook, but if it has both primary and secondary memory, like my Sony Reader (internal and SD card), another good use for tags is to differentiate which books go to which area of memory.

[Starson17]

Tags are easy to use and incredibly flexible. I do exactly what you describe all the time. Yes, I use them to monitor workflow as described by others, but when you say "to me, the meta data should be about the content of the book, not about where the book is in your workflow" that's a problem with your mental concept of what they should be, not a problem with the tag system itself. Give yourself a chance to use tags for workflow as well as other aspects of your books and you will come to love them as I have.

[rchiav]

The tags just don't do it for me. You shouldn't have to drill down into a view by tags, edit all your existing ebooks and all the other things you guys are talking about to simply separate books.

I am an amateur photographer and I use metadata tags quite a bit for describing images (what the tags are really intended to do), but all the photo editing software I've used also allows you to organize your images separate from the tags that describe what's actually in the image, or in this case, ebook. The tags easily allow you to find things based on the content, which never changes. You don't have to edit the metadata of images to keep track of where you are in your workflow with any photo management and editing software I've ever used.

Using tags really seems like more of a workaround to a limitation of the software here. If the intention was to use tags to manage your workflow, why wouldn't there be an option to automatically add specific tags to books when they're imported? Workflow really doesn't seem to have been a big consideration here, and that's a shame.

[rchiav]

Originally Posted by Starson17

Tags are easy to use and incredibly flexible. I do exactly what you describe all the time. Yes, I use them to monitor workflow as described by others, but when you say "to me, the meta data should be about the content of the book, not about where the book is in your workflow" that's a problem with your mental concept of what they should be, not a problem with the tag system itself. Give yourself a chance to use tags for workflow as well as other aspects of your books and you will come to love them as I have.

No, I'll just build a workflow outside of Calibre and just use Calibre to convert and edit and then remove then from the application when I'm done using it's features that it does well.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by rchiav

No, I'll just build a workflow outside of Calibre and just use Calibre to convert and edit and then remove then from the application when I'm done using it's features that it does well.

That's fine. Different strokes and all that. I scarcely ever use the convert and edit features. I want the database with its powerful search capability and remote access to all my books through the content server. Edit: And the recipe based news - I love that!

If you don't want to use the tags in a way that differs from the way you use them for photographs, you don't have to. You're still welcome here. Let us know if you have any questions.

[rchiav]

Well I hope I'm still welcome. I was just hoping I was missing something and there was some hidden options that I didn't find, because otherwise I really liked the app.

[animedude01]

Personally, I think you're just adding more work for yourself, but you should do what makes you comfortable.

I think one big difference is that for photo work most photogs do a lot of extra work, where for ebooks, most people don't do extra work. They just use Calibre to manage their book collection and use it to load new books onto their readers.

That's pretty much what I use it for. I don't do a lot of conversions because I try to buy in the format that my reader uses and most of my books are from Smashwords & Baen that are multi-format anyway.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by animedude01

I think one big difference is that for photo work most photogs do a lot of extra work, where for ebooks, most people don't do extra work.

It's normal for those who are new to Calibre to want to separate out books that they haven't "finished" working on. It does take work to fetch the metadata from online so the books have covers - check that the publisher, ISBN, series name and series_index are filled in, etc.

One thing that is not easily recognized is that this idea of separating the "in-progress" books from the "finished" often isn't even necessary.

It's easy to do with tags, but then you may find yourself trying to separate the "books-that-have-automatically-fetched-metadata" from the "I've-personally-checked-that-the-metadata-is-correct" books. Then there's the "these-books-have-covers-but-not-publisher-info" group.

Usually all the "in-progress" concept means is that there is an empty field in the metadata, like the cover, comments or publisher. A simple search like "cover:false", "comments:false" or "publisher:false" will find records like that.

[itimpi]

I tend to handle the case of "new" books by simply sorting by date added so that the most recently added ones are at the top.

[rchiav]

It's more of the "I know I have all the metadata how I want it and I'm done". Any new book that I brought in would immediately fall into the "in-progress" category because I haven't checked it. It you could auto apply that to any imported book, it would be very helpful. Having another field to designate status would also be very helpful. Right now I have 17 books in Calibre and I've pulled down metadata from the web. These 17 books now have 99 total tags. If I add a tag for workflow, it's 100. I don't mind the 99 tags to describe what's in the book, but having to scroll through 99 tags, and I presume there will be more as I add more books, to filter books based on whether or not I'm done with them seems less efficient than it could be. Not marking a book as either "complete" or "in progress" would also leave me personally wondering, "wait, did I clean that one up?" The other option is to delete all the other tags and just use tags for workflow I guess.

So for right now I'll have a folder for ebooks that I haven't run through Calibre and a folder for anything I know has the correct metadata, etc.

[polly]

This may be too basic, but I sort by the date column when I add books. I tend to load all the books by one author and then fix the metadata for those books. When I have the metadata, conversions, etc finished for those books, I move on to the next set. I know I've finished with a record when the book has a cover. Personally, I turn off the tag download for my books because I want to set my own tags and not accept the 15 that someone else recommended for that book. You can find the checkbox for that in the Preferences menu.

[animedude01]

You might want to be careful with that because sometimes the date field gets filled with when the book was posted to a site rather then the date entered into Calibre. For example, I just downloaded Kevis Hendricksons Gaia trilogy and loaded it into Calibre. The date field was filled in and defaulted to when the book was posted to Smashwords. I had to manually change the date to today.

Just an FYI.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by rchiav

It's more of the "I know I have all the metadata how I want it and I'm done".

I have my search bar set to "not tag:done". There are no books visible because all my books are tagged "done". When I drag new books in, the new ones are the only books that appear. I work on them, and when I'm comfortable, I highlight them all hit "e," type "done" on the tag line and click OK. I'm through and ready for the next batch.

Realistically, however, they are often not truly done. I may decide later that I want a cover image from Google Images even though the automatic fetcher didn't pull one. Or I may want to change the series name or number (Conan stories have an entire Wikipedia page just on the multiple numbering schemes for series). I use the false searches to find them.

Any new book that I brought in would immediately fall into the "in-progress" category because I haven't checked it. It you could auto apply that to any imported book, it would be very helpful. Having another field to designate status would also be very helpful.

You're still new to Calibre. You may want to read the FAQ about proposed new fields that people often want. If you've got a suggested improvement, the bug tracker is the best place to put it.

Right now I have 17 books in Calibre and I've pulled down metadata from the web. These 17 books now have 99 total tags. If I add a tag for workflow, it's 100. I don't mind the 99 tags to describe what's in the book, but having to scroll through 99 tags, and I presume there will be more as I add more books, to filter books based on whether or not I'm done with them seems less efficient than it could be.

Very few people do it that way. Most have a few tags they know - "done", "read", "news", "myname" and "my-wife's-name" are typical. They simply type those in the search bar, or call up the last remembered search. That's how I usually do it.

Alternatively, many people turn off the metadata tags from fetching. Some ereaders create groups based on tags and they do not want all those tags that come from fetching online.

Not marking a book as either "complete" or "in progress" would also leave me personally wondering, "wait, did I clean that one up?"

Type not tag:complete and not tag:"in progress" will show them all (assuming you tagged as you describe), and you'd quickly see if they had covers, ratings, publisher info, etc.

The other option is to delete all the other tags and just use tags for workflow I guess.

It's really not necessary. They really can do all the jobs quite easily and far more easily than putting them into separate folders.

So for right now I'll have a folder for ebooks that I haven't run through Calibre and a folder for anything I know has the correct metadata, etc.

You are free to do it your way. However, everyone I've introduced to Calibre has eventually made the same transition I made and has used tags instead of folders. It really does work well.