[GUI Plugin] Find Duplicates

[DMee]

OK, dunno if this is working as planned or not but I got warned of duplicates with a single author's books and multiple author's when doing our "Ignore Title, Similar Authors" to correct initials

e.g.

A. N. Author
A. N. Author & Z. T. Anotherauthor

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by DMee

OK, dunno if this is working as planned or not but I got warned of duplicates with a single author's books and multiple author's when doing our "Ignore Title, Similar Authors" to correct initials

e.g.

A. N. Author
A. N. Author & Z. T. Anotherauthor

I haven't seen that happen where the A. N. Author is truly the same for all books. Double check the periods and the spacing... Every time I thought they were the same it was one of those two.

[DMee]

Grrrrr - if Calibre would stop crashing I might :-(

They did all look the same but it was difficult to tell when they were in the middle of a long list of authors - then Calibre crashed - for about the 30th time today - god does it hate me editing metadata :-(

[kiwidude]

@DMee - mbovenka has it spot on, there will be something different about one of the authors in that *group*. In Ignore Title mode the plugin will show all books for that author, which is why you will see rows on your screen that include their collaborations. However look across all the authors in that group (the tag browser filtering may be the easiest way to see) and you will spot a variation. Once you remove that variation then the next time you run the author won't appear at all.

[kiwidude]

As mentioned a few posts ago I've added a completely new feature as per the screenshot below. This will allow users to find variations in Authors, Series, Publisher or Tags using different algorithms.

You will need calibre 0.8.59 to try this.

On the Find Duplicates dropdown menu is a new option of "Find metadata variations". Unlike the normal Find book duplicates screen, this is a self-contained dialog allowing you to perform the rename operation in place for all the selected variations. If you tick the "Show matching books" option, then in the background your calibre GUI will execute a search and show you the related books. So for Authors and Series renaming you may sometimes want to see the related books to decide if they really are duplicates, but in many other cases you don't need to.

This dialog is in some ways an experiment. The Authors functionality is in reality just a different way of presenting what you saw with "Ignore Title" book duplicate searches. I could have also made the series, publisher and tags features all work the same way, dumping you back to the calibre gui showing you one set of data at a time and highlighting in the tag browser.

However the tag browser is not convenient for doing bulk renaming operations like this, and often you don't even need to see the books, so having the overhead of navigating through duplicate groups etc seems overkill. Traditionally there have been issues with renaming series via the tag browser too (since calibre renumbers them), though 0.8.59 offers a new tweak value of "no_change" for "Auto increment series index" - thanks very much chaley for doing this. Note that this new plugin does *not* need you to apply that tweak value if you rename series, as it always preserves numbering.

Anyways please experiment with it, try to break it and let me know if this interface approach is something that works well for this feature.

[44reader]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

... let me know if this interface approach is something that works well for this feature.

I've only had a quick play but I really like it. Very useful.

[RsH]

I've had to revert to version 0.8.43 to stop all of the crashes of Calibre, which were driving me crazy... so can I get an OLDER version of the Find Duplicates plug-in to use with this older version of Calibre?

[GoghGirl]

I just updated Calibre and I no longer see my plugins (find Duplicates/Goodreads/etc) along the top. I no longer see any way to access them.

Did I turn them off somehow(I see they are still installed) or was the update/install bugged or something?

Very confused... How do I fix it?

* Edit: Nevermind. After two restarts my plugins started showing up again mysteriously. O.o

[kiwidude]

@GoghGirl - there are only two reasons why plugins will disappear. Either you installed a version of calibre that is too old for the version of the plugin you have installed. Or you now have your device plugged in and you haven't put the plugins on the toolbar that appears when your device is in. You can fix the latter in Preferences -> Toolbars.

[GoghGirl]

@kiwidude Thanks! I rarely had my nook plugged in for long so I never noticed that the plugins were not displayed! Properly updated now!

[DMee]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

@DMee - mbovenka has it spot on, there will be something different about one of the authors in that *group*. In Ignore Title mode the plugin will show all books for that author, which is why you will see rows on your screen that include their collaborations. However look across all the authors in that group (the tag browser filtering may be the easiest way to see) and you will spot a variation. Once you remove that variation then the next time you run the author won't appear at all.

Yeah - finally sussed - I had 29 books OK and one which was "wrong" - maybe a way of highlighting the different versions in different colours in next version ?? :-)

[kiwidude]

@DMee - as I said in my comment the tag browser has highlighted all of the author(s) in the group if you have"Highlight authors in the tag browser for ignore title searches" ticked in the dialog. Plus there is the completely new "Find metadata variations" dialog in the beta above which gives you a simpler view of the author name variations.

[DMee]

Wasn't grouching - just agreeing :-) with suggestion to highlight the different spellings differently - however - playing with new version now so moot :-)

OK, first run of "metadata" on authors "Similar" picked 2 errors where suffuxes had somehow become another author so I had

A.N. Author & Jr.
A.N. Other & Iii

The pluging suspected Jr. and Iii were similar and needed tweaking - I had "Show books" ticked and spotted the error. However, I was locked within the plugin window and couldn't edit the books metadata and if I closed the plugin window it cancelled the search so I lost the 2 books involved.... and the search didn't appear in my search history for me to easily re-run

[DMee]

OK, fixed those two and spotted some other authors where the author sort had decided Jr. was surname etc - god whoever entered the initial metadata should be shot!

OK, so then re-ran it and got


calibre, version 0.8.59
ERROR: Unhandled exception: <b>KeyError</b>:4027

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre_plugins.find_duplicates.dialogs", line 597, in _refresh_results
File "calibre_plugins.find_duplicates.dialogs", line 614, in _populate_items_list
KeyError: 4027

Any thoughts??

[DMee]

Restarting Calibre fixed the error - I then got "You have no authors...." message