How to organize collections

[Like Ra]

oopsie I didn't see this one. My bad

It's my task to remember 3,295 threads 😅

That also means, that we think alike 😉

[dhf7b8g]

I've put serious effort into my ebook collection.

Yeah I can see that. We seem to be taking quite different approaches to our ebook collections which is interesting.

I'm still using a spreadsheet, but I really ought to rework that into a database sometime soon.

Is there any reason you decided to use a spreadsheet for your ebooks instead of calibre itself? portability maybe? Calibre generally handles extra fields well and can handle multiple file types of the same book (eg mobi, epub and pdf). I have a few extra fields myself for illustrator, translator, word and page count as well as many books in both epub and pdf format, I even have a few in CBZ (yuck) and it handles those fine.

I don't particularly like the calibre folder structure but I generally never interact with it as my viewing frontends are calibre-web and OPDS so I have my entire collection wherever I have an internet connection and I can pre-download anything I think I will need if I'm going out of range.

All of my naming and metadata is done through calibre and is never applied to the actual file itself until its downloaded to a different device through OPDS or calibre-web. The only changes I make to the files directly are fixes to the contents and even then I will keep a V1 and V2 inside my library.

[Max515]

I have aprox. 10 TB of files. About 1 TB of those is porn. This is how I organize them.

I have an Archive with categories and subcategories.

- Video = everything video goes in here. Subcategories: Cinema (subcategories by genre), Series (each in it's own directory), Documentary (subcategories by theme), Music Videos (this includes official music videos and youtube artists), Music Concerts, Educational (mostly how-to youtube clips), Presentations (lectures, TEDs, etc.), Fun (everything funny with no educational or artistic value), Utils (such as TV calibration patterns and video test files). Porn isn't here.

- Audio = everything audio goes in here, but it's mostly music. Subcategories: CDs (complete albums in lossless format), Tracks (separated tracks, when I don't like the whole CD, only some of the tracks), Search (music that I like, but couldn't find it in a lossless format yet), MIDI (yes, I still listen to MIDI files from time to time), and Modules (if you don't know what they are, don't ask).

- Image = Images, but no personal photos or porn. It's mostly art.

- Text = text only. Books by theme, online articles, copied blog posts, etc.

- Discs = CD and DVD images: operating system images (linux), Windows install CDs, games and programs that only run from the CD, bootable recovery CDs, etc.

- Exec = Computer programs, operating system updates, windows drivers, games. Drivers are sorted by the hardware they're for. Games, programs and updates are grouped by the oldest operating system they can run on.

- Data = These are data files that don't belong in the other categories. LLMs, GPS maps, fonts, MIDI soundfonts, ringtones, etc.

Archive contains mostly public data, data that (except for copyright issues) I wouldn't mind if it became public on the internet.
Everything in Archive is manually sorted, named, tagged (for music) and has a CRC check file (sfv or sha1). I never used an automated tool to sort, tag, or keep track of my files. I sometimes use a duplicate file finder, but very rarely.

There's also a directory with files that I haven't seen/sorted yet. Unfortunately this is constantly increasing due to lack of time. I try to keep the files in it at least properly named so I know what they are without having to open them.

Separate from Archive, I have personal data:
- Official documents, scanned
- Software licenses that I bought
- Personal photos
- Recorded phone calls (yes, I record all of them)
- Files that I created for personal use (computer programs, Excel files, etc.)
- Files that I created for work, including all emails (I shouldn't have these on my personal computer, but who knows when I might need them.)
- Saved configuration files/settings
- Saved games (in case I want to continue/restart the game later)
- Data backups
- Porn in a TrueCrypt volume

The porn is sorted/grouped in directories by their site of origin (if known) or their main theme (if site not known). Categories are: Bondage (with subcategories by the tie position), Fetish (with subcategories by the fetish element that attracted me the most), and Vanilla.

[Penguin]

[quote="Penguin" pid="78954" d
Is there any reason you decided to use a spreadsheet for your ebooks instead of calibre itself? portability maybe? Calibre generally handles extra fields well and can handle multiple file types of the same book (eg mobi, epub and pdf). I have a few extra fields myself for illustrator, translator, word and page count as well as many books in both epub and pdf format, I even have a few in CBZ (yuck) and it handles those fine.

I can see I will have to take a closer look at Calibre.

The reason I use a spreadsheet is completely empirical: I found I had to keep active track of my ebooks to be reasonably sure I didn't unintentionally acquire multiple copies of the same work in the the same format.

Your post was the first inkling I had that Calibre could be used as a collection listing and organizing tool.

In fact, I was using a spreadsheet to keep track of my ebooks well before I even realized that Calibre was a must-have.

I became a very enthusiastic Excel user more than 20 years ago.  It's one of the most flexible and protean tools I've found that's native to Windows.  So when I'm presented with a new information organizing task of intermediate size on a Windows system, it's one of the first apps I reach for.

Another favorite is the Windows port of emacs.  My acquaintance with that one goes back to Sun workstations in the mid 1980s.

[Like Ra]

Sun workstations

👍 I used Sun stuff up to 2010 or something.

[Penguin]

Sun workstations

👍 I used Sun stuff up to 2010 or something.

Which was approximately the point at which Oracle bought up the remains of Sun Microsystems, guaranteeing it's utter ruination and eventual demise.

Oracle is an omniparasite, the corporate equivalent of Christopher Rowley's "Vang".  They ingest working companies, usurp their control structures, then eat them from the inside out.  Once they've sucked out everything with food value, they discard the empty husk.

In a civilized polity, which we do not live in BTW, one or more likely several members of Oracle's C-suite would aeady be living as involuntary guests of the state, consequential to their commission of blatant control fraud.

But since we actually live in an oligarchic borderline fascism, this will not happen.

[Zooy]

Sun workstations

👍 I used Sun stuff up to 2010 or something.

At my work we had Apollo workstations, which were very nice stations. Apollo was however bought by HP in 1989 to take some of their niceties, and for the rest kill the company. I always considered it a big pity. Whenever somebody makes something nice (also NeXT) one of the bigger companies buys it and kills it to eliminate potential competitors.

[Like Ra]

Oracle is an omniparasite, the corporate equivalent of Christopher Rowley's "Vang".  They ingest working companies, usurp their control structures, then eat them from the inside out.  Once they've sucked out everything with food value, they discard the empty husk.

While I agree with you, I must admit, that Oracle at least USED (or still using) those companies (or some of them). Think of Sun and MySQL. Sun (despite all my love to that company), on the contrary, was killing the companies without even using them. And, at the end, was eaten ...

[dhf7b8g]

Getting round to organising my videos. Started with my old Bondage Junkies collection.

I'm using Stash which I found recently. The features it offers are basically anything you could need to organise any visual content. Videos, Galleries and individual images can have various metadata attached such as tags, performer info (director and photographer included) and descriptions. Here are some images of the UI.

Filtering by studio:
   

Filtering by tags:
   

Inbuilt video player with transcode support:
   

Linking scenes and galleries together:
   

Getting the data from the bondage junkies site was pretty straightforward. A little bit of python web scraping was enough to grab all the data other than performer info (which I am slowly filling in manually) Stash stores its data in a standard sqlite DB so programmatically inserting large amounts of data in is an easy task once you understand the schema.

I'm pretty happy with it from the few days I have been using it and I think I'm gonna stick with it for the foreseeable future. I will need to decide on a global tag system once I start adding more studios and individual videos as right now I'm just using the scraped bondage junkies tags.

[Like Ra]

I'm using Stash which I found recently.

... downloading ...
. . .
... scanning ...