Calibre: ebooks-filenames

[Pulp]

I installed and played around with calibre a bit and I really like it!

There is one thing though that prevents me from using it for my collection and I hope its resolvable.

I have sorted my ebooks in a similar way that calibre does - author names as folders with the ebooks in it; I also have my ebooks named "author - title.xxx".
Sadly Calibre does not accept my filenamestructure but instead copies all the files into it's own structure and renames the files to "title - author.xxx".
Is there a way to chose a different output format?

I'm well aware it sounds petty, but I have spend so many hours getting all my ebooks named and ordered I would love to keep the names the way I chose.

Is it possible? And if not - could it be in the future?

[itimpi]

The Calibre naming convention is not amenable to change. The way is stores books is built into the guts of the programs and thus not easy to change.

It is a good idea to think of the Calibre set of files as its own internal database - and in earlier releases of Calibre it really was physically a database rather than a file structure but that grew rather large as book collections grew.

Kovid has said it may change in the future - but certainly not in the near future.

[Tom Swift]

What a coincidence. I came on to look for a solution to this and found someone today had the same question.

I am still somewhat old-fashioned and I prefer to use a file manager for quick and easy sorting of files. I can see at a glance what I have and with a useful filename, the files can be used for a long time with minimal difficulty. I finished tagging and renaming a large amount of files and when I looked at them in the file manager, the naming convention of title and first and last name of the author is not very useful. The ideal would be last name, first name - title with an option to put in the series number. (last name, first name - series - title).

A handy option would be to have the option to output the converted file with the filename as a variable. I am thinking of mediamonkey, the mp3 library program that gives the option to rename a file based on the metatags of the mp3.

Does calibre use the metatags of the file for sorting or does it use the filename only? If I rename the files myself, will calibre still find them properly?

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by Tom Swift

A handy option would be to have the option to output the converted file with the filename as a variable. I am thinking of mediamonkey, the mp3 library program that gives the option to rename a file based on the metatags of the mp3.

Kovid has suggested this will be added in the future for exporting the books from the calibre database.

Does calibre use the metatags of the file for sorting or does it use the filename only? If I rename the files myself, will calibre still find them properly?

All sorting in Calibre iis done against the data held in the Metadata database. The filenames are stored in the Calibre Metadata database to link the stored book information to the underlying files. If you rename the files calibre will no longer be able to find them, and due to the fact that the file system and the metadata database are now out of sync you might some unpredictable results.

[Pulp]

As filenames are used as a "database" I assume that at some point the values "author" and "title" are read from this "database".

Would it not be possible to define if the names are stored as "title - author" or "author - title", they are in both cases seperated by a "-" (only one time the last, the second time the first occurance)

It does not really matter if this definition is not changeable anymore once the first book was imported (saves you the hassle to rename all books once the definition is changed, but it would help a lot if we could chose the format.

[itimpi]

No - the author/title are not normally taken from the book title, but from the metadata stored inside the book. They are only taken from the filename for formats that do not support metadata (e.g. text files), and this occurs at the time they are imported and the results are stored in metadata.db. After that Calibre does not refer to the underlying files containing the actual books except for exporting or copying to a device.

As to whether alternative naming will be possible in the future, Kovid has state that this is on the TODO list, but unlikely to appear anytime soon as it is a lot of effort to change.

[Pulp]

Thanks alot for explaining!
It's great news that it is on the ToDo-list, means I can switch to Calibre

[itimpi]

Of course if you REALLY want this facility, since Calibre is Open-Source you could work out the patches to implement it and submit them to Kovid for inclusion

[Pulp]

Good point - but with me only just starting with python it will probably be done long before me being able to produce acceptable results

[user_none]

Originally Posted by Pulp

Good point - but with me only just starting with python it will probably be done long before me being able to produce acceptable results

You will learn a lot looking though Calibre's code base and you would be surprised how quick it is to produce acceptable results.

[Trester]

I am using the latest version (0.6.55) of Calibre and it seems to have had the feature added that will allow the naming of file to a specified format. In my case, I would like the files named in the format of: Author (last, first) - Title. Despite inputting the parameters in the Save parameters, the files are always saved as Title - Author. Am I doing something wrong? Listed below is the command line in the save display.

{authors} - {title}

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Trester

I am using the latest version (0.6.55) of Calibre and it seems to have had the feature added that will allow the naming of file to a specified format. In my case, I would like the files named in the format of: Author (last, first) - Title. Despite inputting the parameters in the Save parameters, the files are always saved as Title - Author. Am I doing something wrong? Listed below is the command line in the save display.

{authors} - {title}

I don't believe you can change the file format within the Calibre database.

There are templates to change the file name on Send to Device and Save to Disk, but neither changes the format of the names within the Calibre database (file structure) itself.

[Trester]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

I don't believe you can change the file format within the Calibre database.

There are templates to change the file name on Send to Device and Save to Disk, but neither changes the format of the names within the Calibre database (file structure) itself.

Thanks for your response. I obviously mis-understood how the save parameter was supposed to work. Using the Save to disk function that you mentioned allowed me to achieve what I wanted. Thanks again!

[PaxtonReader]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

I don't believe you can change the file format within the Calibre database.

There are templates to change the file name on Send to Device and Save to Disk, but neither changes the format of the names within the Calibre database (file structure) itself.

Is there a way to keep the original file name? I want the corrected books with metadata back on my Kindle, and want Amazon to be able to recognize the book for saved notations and page syncing across devices. With totally different file names, it can't do that. I don't mind how the book is stored on the PC, but I'd like to be able to replace the book on my Kindle without having to manually rename it to the original name (which I am doing now).

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by PaxtonReader

Is there a way to keep the original file name? I want the corrected books with metadata back on my Kindle, and want Amazon to be able to recognize the book for saved notations and page syncing across devices. With totally different file names, it can't do that. I don't mind how the book is stored on the PC, but I'd like to be able to replace the book on my Kindle without having to manually rename it to the original name (which I am doing now).

I am not a Kindle user but I do recall a thread where someone had to change the name of the saved notations (on the kindle) to match the book name??? to recover notes.

Maybe Griker can recall the specifics.