Mixed folder structure - How best to import?

[yogi62]

Hi guys,

I have a situation where my folder structure includes folders where the name is the name of an author with a sub folder which is the name of the book - the sub folder contains all the necessary data.

Unfortunately the folder structure also contains folders that are the complete reverse. eg: the main folder is the title of the book and the sub folder is the name of the author, not only that but in some instances there is more than one subfolder each with the authors name but containing the same book in different formats.

Does anyone know of a practical way of automatically changeing the file structure so that Calibre can sort the author / book title so I can make future searches by either the book title or author.

At present imported books show a mixture of author and book title in the authors column.

I don't want to have to rename all the folders/sub folders by hand as the library is close on 2000 books!!

Any and all help appreciated

[theducks]

Calibre import using Filename for Metadata only works at the the file level.
If the book has embedded metadata, it is best to use that instead.
Preferences: Adding Books: Read metadata from contents tick


If that is not doable.
Getting this Plugin (and setting it up BEFORE you add)
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=278559 might help sort the strays

Oh
And the Quality Check PI has tools to flip names, format Initials consistently on SELECTED titles. All these should reduce the amount of individual massaging the data

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by yogi62

Hi guys,

I have a situation where my folder structure includes folders where the name is the name of an author with a sub folder which is the name of the book - the sub folder contains all the necessary data.

Unfortunately the folder structure also contains folders that are the complete reverse. eg: the main folder is the title of the book and the sub folder is the name of the author, not only that but in some instances there is more than one subfolder each with the authors name but containing the same book in different formats.

Does anyone know of a practical way of automatically changeing the file structure so that Calibre can sort the author / book title so I can make future searches by either the book title or author.

At present imported books show a mixture of author and book title in the authors column.

I don't want to have to rename all the folders/sub folders by hand as the library is close on 2000 books!!

Any and all help appreciated

I had a similar situation with my initial library load on Windows. What I did I was to make file names consistent with Bulk Rename Utility (BRU) before I added them to the library, in my case it was 30,000 'books'. From memory the renaming took maybe 10-15 minutes. There's not much in regards to renaming that can't be done with BRU, I also like it because you get a preview, if you spot an anomaly you can exclude it.

The adding took a few weeks in batches of 500 books, more than that exceeded my daily capacity to update the metadata. My 'books' are not commercial publications, so there's no metadata download sources and nothing embedded that calibre can extract.

BR

[yogi62]

theducks / BetterRed

Many thanks for such a speedy response. I'll take look at both suggestions,

BetterRed, when you say 'make consistent' can you give an example? I have BRU and would be interested in precisely what you did? As each book has a different name (unlike files that can be altered sequentially) I'm not clear on what you changed?

many thanks

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by yogi62

BetterRed, when you say 'make consistent' can you give an example? I have BRU and would be interested in precisely what you did? As each book has a different name (unlike files that can be altered sequentially) I'm not clear on what you changed?

Sheesh I cant remember the details, it was more than 5 years ago, I can barely remember what I did 5 minutes ago

However, I suspect I mainly used the options I've highlighted in the attached screen shot. My books were in dozen or so folders, within a folder the names were reasonably consistent, but quite different between folders. So for each folder I would have used different BRU options. It truth be known it probably took me an hour to do the renaming, mainly because of the need to deal with exceptions on a one by one basis. But it allowed me to set the Add books regex to one of the presets (title - authors), and it's been thus ever since.

BR