Is there any advantage to storing a separate cover.jpg?

[terencek]

Right from the beginning I checked the Calibre option which automatically creates and stores a separate cover.jpg image with each book file it converts or processes. But now it occurs to me this is taking an enormous amount of extra space on my Kindle, doubling the number of files.

So: is there in fact any reason why one would create and store a separate cover.jpg file with each book rather than just having it embedded in the .mobi file?

And if not: will it affect anything if I run a global search on my Kindle (from the computer) and simply delete all the cover.jpg files (about 1,500 in my case!)

[mr ploppy]

You don't need the jpg on your Kindle it's just for converting to different formats.

[terencek]

So I CAN safely delete the hundreds of cover.jpg files on my Kindle without any negative effects?

[Alissa]

Originally Posted by terencek

So I CAN safely delete the hundreds of cover.jpg files on my Kindle without any negative effects?

I believe so. Nothing should be changed on the Kindle device side.

The only negative effect I can imagine from deleting separate cover image files is that managing hundreds of .mobi files with Windows Explorer may become less easy...

# No, this message is not meant as an advertisement of my MobiHandler program...

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by terencek

So I CAN safely delete the hundreds of cover.jpg files on my Kindle without any negative effects?

I can only add that I have no jpg files at all on my Kindle, and it works perfectly - including the ability to see the built-in covers.

[montalex]

This sounded like a good idea, especially because my storage folder for Calibre is a Dropbox. So I just searched the book folder on My Dropbox for cover.jpg, and deleted all of them, and everything is fine. Of course, I no longer see the covers in Calibre, but they are there in the mobi's and epub's. Most of the cover jpg's are tiny, so I saved maybe 50MB.

Thanks for the idea. Oh, I had to delete them in small batches. Something about deleting files within Window Search kept closing Explorer if I tried to delete too many at a time. I had to delete 15 - 20 at a time. It took just a few minutes to go through 800 or so.

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by montalex

Something about deleting files within Window Search kept closing Explorer if I tried to delete too many at a time. I had to delete 15 - 20 at a time. It took just a few minutes to go through 800 or so.

I was going to suggest that, instead of serching for the files, you show the folder in "details" view, and sort on the "ty[e" column. That will put all the JPGs together, so you could multi-select them and delete them in one hit.

But I see you've deleted them all now anyway.

[terencek]

Thanks for all the input, and unlike Montalex above, I had no trouble at all (in Windows 7) running a search for 'cover.jpg', then having Explorer display about 1,500 in my case, and simply highlighting and zapping the lot -- took barely a minute or two.

And yes, I can THOROUGHLY recommend Alissa's brilliant little MobiHandler app which just happened to fall into her posting above! :-) Especially if you no longer have the cover.jpg files, just pumping up the icons to Extra Large still gives you the ability to browse by cover when using the computer. Indispensable!

[montalex]

Originally Posted by Mike L

I was going to suggest that, instead of serching for the files, you show the folder in "details" view, and sort on the "ty[e" column. That will put all the JPGs together, so you could multi-select them and delete them in one hit.

But I see you've deleted them all now anyway.

This won't work with Calibre, because each book has its own sub-folder.

[montalex]

Originally Posted by terencek

Thanks for all the input, and unlike Montalex above, I had no trouble at all (in Windows 7) running a search for 'cover.jpg', then having Explorer display about 1,500 in my case, and simply highlighting and zapping the lot -- took barely a minute or two.

Another reason to upgrade to Windows 7, although the problem may not be XP, but the slow processor on my Pentium 4 machine. Windows Explorer kept crashing when I would try to delete multiple files from the search window. Whatever. It was worth doing to make more space.