New install for old user need to know "must have" plugins

[LadyKate]

Hi all. I think this is where I should be. I had not upgraded my calibre for a couple of years because my desktop is not functioning. Got fed up and finally installed it on my amd laptop although it is a pain to be down to 8 gig ram.

My problem? I have not kept up for almost 2 years on the plugins and I used a lot of them regularly.

I would like to have a "Must Have" list of plugins for a user who has a library of over 300,000 "books" (we could also say books and documents).

I used to clean up most books once I got them into Calibre and I like the getfilename to have the info from the filename in case a metadata search somehow changes (yeah, I know it's me hitting something) the title/author series etc. I like to remove static bookmarks so the book when I load it on my reader/tablet/phone will open fresh with no previous reading history.

So, If you have the time, what plugins would you consider essential to a clean install of Calibre.

Thanks for your time
Kate

[BetterRed]

Ranked in order of the 'value' to me.

View Manager
Favourites Menu
CalibreSpy
Job Spy
Modify ePub
Count Pages
Drop Search Results
GetFileName
Find Duplicates
Extract ISBN
Reading List
*Quality Check
*Diaps Editing Toolbag
*EpubSplit
*Resize Cover
*User Category

* not convinced I need these

Added: I moved your post to here, plugins are regarded as part of the calibre furniture to help manage calibre libraries.

Related Tools are third party applications that integrate, or are used in conjunction, with calibre; servers, cloud, network, backup and others.

BR

[LadyKate]

Thank you for the list. I see some I had forgotten about some of them. I used to use Quality Check a lot but that seems less important these days unless it is checking the quality of documents that are not "polished". I can't access my old setup yet. Darn eyes not up to getting the desktop system to run... can't see well enough at the distance for working inside a box to make sure the connections are correct.

Also thank you for moving the thread. I was debating where this belonged and couldn't think of the correct place.

Another comment is that in the days when we had small drives and smaller sd cards etc it made a lot of sense to reduce the file size for those books going to devices with tiny memory amounts free. Now when I think of my tablet or phone's sd card being 256 gig instead of 128 meg (going back to early days of reading on iPaq etc) it seemed very important to reduce the size of images/covers to save space. Now, it seems like a waste of time to reduce the size of a cover and even worse, it lowers the quality of the book in the library.

Again, thanks for the list. Now to get to work figuring out how to setup my file exporting. Almost two years and I feel like I forgot how I set all those things up.

Kate

[JSWolf]

I'll add a rather important plugin to the list, DeDRM (https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com).

If you use a Kindle, Hyphenation This! And if you use the Calibre editor, epubcheck.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

I would like to have a "Must Have" list of plugins for a user who has a library of over 300,000 "books" (we could also say books and documents).

I used to clean up most books once I got them into Calibre and I like the getfilename to have the info from the filename in case a metadata search somehow changes (yeah, I know it's me hitting something) the title/author series etc. I like to remove static bookmarks so the book when I load it on my reader/tablet/phone will open fresh with no previous reading history.

For your case, I'd suggest:

View Manager - Since you mentioned "books and documents," you might want to split those up into virtual libraries. View Manager lets you switch between different column sets for the VLs.

You already mentioned GetFileName.

Job Spy has a lot of helpful features, but make sure to read the tooltips.

Quality Check to find the embedded bookmarks, and Modify ePub to remove them.

Depending on what metadata you like to have, Count Pages, Extract ISBN, Library Codes (ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 conversion), and Modify Series all have their uses.

There's a number of options for cleaning the messy HTML out of comments; Job Spy has one, and there's Clean Comments and Comments Cleaner.

Even if you don't actually have duplicates, Find Duplicate's fuzzy matching is helpful for finding near-identical metadata (e.g. authors with middle initials, or the mess that's "Scholastic/Scholastic, Inc/Scholastic Inc").

Favourites Menu is extremely helpful, especially if you use Job Spy (you'll understand what I mean).

I'm probably missing a few things here, but at least there's a start.

[theducks]

BR's stared items are mostly my top used ones.
I like to hammer my metadata into submission.
Look at the ones by Kiwidude.
The Quality check finds issues with books metadata (and has a few Fixes)

Manage Series for us fiction readers. (You said Documents, so you are more into BR's type of use)

Find duplicates. Really handy if you use an Intake Library, to see if you have matches in the MAIN Library

If your old computers HD still works (place in a external case, if the mainboard is dead), and copy your Calibre Config folder to the new system. That HAS all your old PI and settings. Calibre will notify you that updates are available. you will have all your settings in place

[Bookstooge]

I only use the Count Pages, Quality Check, De-drm and Sum Columns plus a few metadata plugins. Oh, and the high quality kindle cover one. Love that!

My library is just over 1K though and I don't do much to the metadata.