Scan hard drives for books not yet in catalog.

[birkmaggs]

I have thousands of ebooks scattered across several hard drives.

Many have not been entered into Calibre

Is there a utility that will scan my hard drives, determine if the book is in my catalog, and enter it automatically, or at least produce a list and I can peruse to decide if I want it entered?

It would not have to be specifically Calibre related, just something that can look at the books in my calibre directory and test them against everything else.

[pdurrant]

There's an import options in calibre preferences that will cause calibre to discard any imported duplicates. Set that, and then use the standard calibre import, using the root folder of each drive. Calibre will itself search through all the folders for ebook files it can import.

[fidvo]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

There's an import options in calibre preferences that will cause calibre to discard any imported duplicates. Set that, and then use the standard calibre import, using the root folder of each drive. Calibre will itself search through all the folders for ebook files it can import.

While this would work, I would recommend caution in using it. You may end up with a lot of entries in your library that you did not expect, depending on your setup and what Calibre considers a book.

In general, if you're going to do a full scan of your hard drive to enter books, you should probably set up a second library and import the books into that first so you can review them before sending them to your main library.

This method isn't perfect, however. The hard drive scan will include Calibre's library itself. If it's importing into your main library, the duplicate checker should catch these and discard them. They won't already exist in the second library, so it will import them in as well, resulting in a copy of all the books in your main library.

My best recommendation is to run the import in batches. Don't scan your entire hard drive; scan the major folders of your hard drive one at a time, or even subfolders. Make sure you don't try to import from Calibre's library folder. This will also allow you to exclude certain folders. For instance, you don't need to try to import from your Windows folder, where you're not likely to have any books.

[JSWolf]

My suggestion is to do a search for the various eBook extensions. Then you can import them all and not get files that are not eBooks.

[eschwartz]

As JSWolf said, I would do a filesystem search for the ebook extensions I wanted.
And exclude the calibre library from being searched!


Then calibre would handle resolving duplicates (or you could use the Find Duplicates plugin for enhanced processing).