Add ability to drag ebooks or folders onto Calibre icon to import

[truth1ness]

Is there some reason dragging ebooks onto the icon works but dragging their folders onto it doesn't? It'd be nice if the dragndrop worked for both.

[kovidgoyal]

When you drag a folder there is no way to know what the folder contains. One book in different formats, multiple books, whether to recuse into folders and so on.

Once could, I suppose popup a dialog asking for answers to those questions, but is that really so much harder that right clicking add books and choosing the appropriate add option.

[truth1ness]

Well click dragging a folder in is one click drag onto the Calibre icon then one click to pick add method (and one can get to the folder via spotlight with no clicks or directly from desktop or browser downloads area).

Without it it's click on the calibre icon to open it, right click add, left click correct add option, then manually navigate the file explorer which could be ~1-4 clicks (depending where it was last), click on target folder, click Add.

So it's 2-3 clicks versus 5-10 clicks. Not terrible but for a fairly common task I'd say worth streamlining if it's not a huge effort. It also makes the behavior consistent for files and folders which is generally good UI design.

[kovidgoyal]

You are neglecting to count the clicks/typing needed to get to the folder in your comparison. Since the add books dialog uses a native Finder dialog, you can use spotlight/whatever other technique you prefer in that dialog as well.

[truth1ness]

Well for example, if I download the files or a zip from a browser it goes to my downloads folder. I can access that folder right from my dock as a 'stack' (every mac has it set up like this out of the box) so I can literally click on the stack and drag the file right from it to Calibre in two clicks (one click and a drag to be precise) from download to Calibre. Even if the File Explorer in Calibre is in the exact right place it takes a minimum of 5 clicks to get to the same point (also, the spotlight in the program finder only searches the local folder, not system wide spotlight, so you would still need to navigate to he right folder which is where you get into the 6+ click range).

Not to mention, if you manually go to the folder to do some initial clean up (if it's grouped with other stuff or has some junk txt files to get rid of, etc) then you have already navigated there once through Finder and if you can't drag it to Calibre then you have to go into Calibre and re-navigate there again a second time.

On top of that, Calibre allows you to drag a Zip file onto the icon, though the import seems to just get stuck. That makes even less sense that while zipped up you can drag it in, but when unzipped you can't, but if you grab the individual files in the folder then you can. The fact that dragging three different file types results in three completely different behaviors (one of which gets the program stuck) I think is reason to address this UI flow at some point. The flow you mentioned is clean and consistent: allow any of the three types to be dragged onto icon, if it is a folder or archive then show a dialog with folder/archive import options.

[kovidgoyal]

You can simply drag to select the files in your download folder and drop them onto the calibre icon. One extra click (to select the files initiallly).

Adding a folder is *different* than adding files. It is meant for adding a folder tree of files, not a few files that happen to be in a single folder. As such, it is an action that is meant o be triggered with deliberation, and not a simple drag and drop.

Just because you want dragging files and folders to be the same, does not mean they are actually the same.