[Enhancement] Option to search & import all bookmarks to annotations browser

[ownedbycats]

Calibre 7.10

Earlier today, I came across a eBook with a pre-Annotations Browser bookmark, which makes me wonder how many other ones there are.

Using Quality Check to search works only if the bookmarks are saved to the eBook file.

It would be helpful if there was an option to check through the books, compare them to everything in %CALIBRE_CONFIG_DIRECTORY%\viewer\annots\ and import anything that isn't there.

Check Library seems like a good place to do it, perhaps optional if it's time-consuming.

Thanks in advance.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

IIRC bookmarks are always saved to the ebook file. Unless the ebook file
is not EPUB (or another format supporting storing of annotations) or the
user turned off the option to save annotations in the book file. The
annotations browser works of a database, not the annotations in either
the config directory or the ebook file. The final view you see of
bookmarks and highlights when you open a book in the viewer is the
result of merging all three of those sources.

Check library works purely with the file structure and database in the
library folder. It's definitely not going to learn how to extract
annotations from various book formats.

Technically, not having the same set of bookmarks in all three places
is not really a bug since the actual final set of bookmarks comes
from all three sources. The three sources are not and cannot in general
be kept in sync. Of course it is a bit sad that the annotations browser
can access the bookmarks from 2 of those sources, but practically
speaking there was not an efficient way to implement that.

There could be a tool (for example a "sync" button in the annotation
browser) that would scan all three sources and bring them all up to date
with each other, but that would be quite slow and a fair bit of work, so
not worth the effort, at least for me.