Cover Art disappeared

[Georgie W]

Nearly all the covers in one of my Calibre libraries have disappeared.

I have 2 libraries, one for e-books—all covers are present & correct.

The other library, for physical books, has a mixture of
* out of print books, where I've scanned in covers myself (and updated the edition info in GoodReads accordingly)
* books with existing covers in GR or Amazon, where the cover is automatically downloaded when I enter the book in Calibre.

Tonight, I've noticed that almost all the covers for the physical books have disappeared. Only covers I've created / downloaded in the last week or so are present.

ETA The "missing" cover images themselves are present in the relevant book folder—they're just not being picked up by Calibre for some reason.
E.g. Peter Ackroyd's "London Under", which I entered last week, has a cover visible in Calibre.
Peter Ackroyd's "Hawsmoor" (entered a year or so ago) has no visible cover, but I can see the cover jpg in the directory folder. [End of edit]

I've exited Calibre & restarted, I haven't updated it recently (ver 7.19), or made any changes. I have a back up of my Calibre user settings from a month ago. Is there anyway to bulk-restore the images for just the Physical Books library from that?

I know I can download only cover metadata but I have nearly 1,000 books, and I'm meticulous about getting the right cover image—the automatic download routine can be hit and miss on whether it gets the right cover. I'd rather avoid that chore if possible.

Any help welcomed. Thanks.

[BetterRed]

Where are you not seeing the covers - in Grid view, in the Book details panel, elsewhere?

BR

[Sirtel]

And the usual suspects - is your library on a network or cloud drive, or is a syncing program running in the background?

[Georgie W]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Where are you not seeing the covers - in Grid view, in the Book details panel, elsewhere?BR

The covers are missing both in Book Details panel and in Grid view.

Originally Posted by Sirtel

And the usual suspects - is your library on a network or cloud drive, or is a syncing program running in the background?

No, just on my PC. No netwwork, not using a cloud drive. No syncing programme.

[BetterRed]

@Georgie W: try this on a book that's lost track of its cover: Open the book folder, then drag-n-drop the cover.jpg over to the Book details panel.

Assuming that fixes that book, what we then need is a method to do that in bulk.

Ideas anyone? I couldn't see anything resembling 'Refresh covers' in Bulk MDE.

BR

[Georgie W]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Georgie W: try this on a book that's lost track of its cover: Open the book folder, then drag-n-drop the cover.jpg over to the Book details panel.

Assuming that fixes that book, what we then need is a method to do that in bulk.

Ideas anyone? I couldn't see anything resembling 'Refresh covers' in Bulk MDE.

BR

Yes, that worked—thank you. And yes, a bulk refresh would be needed (just not practicable to do this one at a time).

Any theories about what might have caused the original disconnect, and how to stop it happening again?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Georgie W

Any theories about what might have caused the original disconnect, and how to stop it happening again?

Anything touching the library folder besides Calibre - backup/syncing programs often cause this. Or if you have done something directly in the library folder yourself - added or deleted books without going through the calibre GUI, for example.

Something apparently has messed with your library folder - nothing disappears from a Calibre library just by itself.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Georgie W

Yes, that worked—thank you. And yes, a bulk refresh would be needed (just not practicable to do this one at a time).

Any theories about what might have caused the original disconnect, and how to stop it happening again?

Install this program ==>> DB Browser for SQLite

Start it and Open the library metadata.db file in the library folder, go into the Browse data tab, load the books table, and have a look at the has_cover column, viz:



Do the '1's and '0's match the presence/absence of the cover display?

If they do then we're on the way to a solution.

Exit DB Browser.
Copy the library metadata.db file somewhere safe.
Now open the metadata.db file with DB Browser
Change the has_cover cell (F2 will open a cell for Edit) for one of the recalcitrant books.
Execute File->Write changes option
Close DB Browser
Start calibre

Can you see the cover?

If you can then… hopefully you can work out the rest.

I have no idea why it happened, or how to stop it happening again… I'll leave the speculating to others.

BR

[Georgie W]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Install this program ==>> DB Browser for SQLite

Start it and Open the library metadata.db file in the library folder, go into the Browse data tab, load the books table, and have a look at the has_cover column.

Ooh, that was interesting. But sadly, every single book has a 1 in the cover column, viz:- for the two Ackroyds. Only a handful of books have 0s and they are all ones where I knew already there was no cover.

I think I'll have to go back and bulk download the covers again, and checking each one bfore I OK it. Bother—because your thoughtful suggestion was definitely worth checking out. Thank you.

Looking at the dates of the affected books, something seems to have happened on 19th Nov to break the connection between Calibre & the stored jpgs. I really can't think what, as I have the soul of a grey, wizened accountant, and am meticulous in my databases. Perhaps it's a sign of the beginning of the end of days, in which case I'll drink the decent gin I've been saving...

[theducks]

Look at the Filename CASE.
I would say Folder, but you did not mention that VIEW also had issues. So it is down to case of cover.jpg

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Georgie W

. . .
something seems to have happened on 19th Nov to break the connection between Calibre & the stored jpgs.

So, around the time the new read aloud feature was introduced to calibre. calibre caches the voices from the piper library it uses, book covers are also cached. Try this:

When calibre is closed, open calibre's configuration folder and you should see a folder named 'caches', rename it to 'save-caches' and restart calibre… it will create a fresh 'caches' folder. If the covers reappear problem solved. If they don't then, with calibre closed, delete 'caches' and rename 'save-caches' back to 'caches'.

I don't have any further suggestions.

BR

↓↓↓ Do chaley's suggestion first!!!

For some reason I thought you'd already tried check library, but now I see there's no evidence of that.

[chaley]

@OP: You imply that the cover files are still there, in which case you should run check library. That will tell you which cover files are really gone vs missing in the database. If the files are still there then check library can reassociate those files with the books.

[Georgie W]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

I ran Check Library, including the second stage checking if the files in the library matched the database. [And I should have thought of doing that earlier.] For almost all pre 19 Nov books, there was a second book folder. E.g. In the File Explorer display of the data base, there was a folder "Peter Ackroyd" with two sub-folders "Hawksmoor (506)" [created 09/03/2022] and "Hawksmoor (3020)" [created 30/11/2024]. 506 & 3020 being the numbers Calibre allocates to book entries.

The earlier 506 folder has both cover.jpg and metadata.opf (both dated 9/3/22). But the metadata in 506 is ONLY Basic Metadata—all my Custom Metadata fields (Dewey no/ Price / format / condition etc) are now shown as Undefined. So in Calibre, I get the cover of the 506 book but only basic metadata.

However, the later 3020 one has only metadata.opf (dated 30/11/24 - I did not create this). If I look at the Book Details for the 3020 book, both basic and custom metadata are present. In Calibre, there is no cover, but full metadata.

So the DB Browser for SQLite has been picking up the earlier folder info ONLY. And I have nearly 1000 duplicate book entries. To date, I have used the Show Duplicates add-in to show me the duplicates; it's clear from the column entry "Dewey no" which book contains the fuller metadata (e.g. 3020) , and I've used copy / paste to transfer the cover image from 506 to 3020. I've then deleted 506. It's a slow process, and one I resent having to do.

For the record, I also renamed the Caches folder (which was empty), and restarted Calibre. That made no difference; the new Caches folder was also empty—I don't know whether that's expected behaviour or not.

I'm conscious that what I'm describing is confusing (well, I'm confused, anyway), and I am really struggling to see how I can have duplicated my library in a way that means that the old entries lose half their metadata whereas new entries retain the metadata but lose the cover images. Sorta illogical, captain.

[chaley]

FWIW the symptoms you describe are exactly those we see when a network drive or file syncing is used. Are you sure that something like OneDrive never tried to take over your library? Or that a backup wasn't running when you ran calibre, locking the library folders?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Georgie W

. . .

I'm conscious that what I'm describing is confusing (well, I'm confused, anyway), and I am really struggling to see how I can have duplicated my library in a way that means that the old entries lose half their metadata whereas new entries retain the metadata but lose the cover images. Sorta illogical, captain.

Where is your library?

If it's in your Documents folder (which is where calibre used to put it), then Onedrive is probably synching it to the cloud see ==>> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...a-6552e77c3057

I don't think it's possible to exclude subfolders within Documents, so the safest solution is to move the library to a location that Onedrive doesn't access by default… e.g. Users\<whatever>\Calibre\Library.

You'll have to configure calibre to use the new location via : Library icon->Switch/create library.

BR