[cMonster]

Some of the images for my books were custom made by scanning and using photoshop. I copy and paste the image into DL and voila, a beautiful looking library. But wait! I want to go back and edit the image but I have deleted the original.

How do I find the image associated with a particular book?

Does DL always name the associated image for a book the same?

I have two libraries (atm, more to come) and I would like to keep all the images in the same folder. If the same book appears in booth libraries will they use the same image or does each library have it's own naming system?

Also, I am assuming the images are saved a jpegs (since I see a bunch of them in the "Plain Covers" folder).

[Delicious Monster]

Every medium has a UUID in the XML file. The image files use the UUID as the filename. The only way to share an image between two libraries is to edit the UUID of the two media in the two libraries to be the same (of course if you scan the item, then make a copy of the library, you'd have two libraries with the same UUIDs)

The one caveat is Delicious Library deletes any unused images, so if you have two 500 item libraries with a 100 item overlap, every time you switch you are going to lose 400 images. If you want to swizzle libraries, swizzle the entire folder. If you want to share images... um... use an external images folder and symlinks would be my first guess.

All the images are JPEGs, but the fancy images (small, medium and large) do not have file extensions. The originals are stored, as you guessed, in the plain folder.

[cMonster]

Lets see if I got this right.
First:
The UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is different for two copies of the same book that are in different libraries. If I scan Guns, Germ and Steal in to one library, quit DL, change the names of the xml files, open DL (now with a different library) and scan Guns, Germ and Steal again, it will have a different UUID than the first one. The only way to find the UUID for each item is open the XML file.

Second:
I enter Complete Work of Michelangelo into the library but Amazon has no covers and I can't find any online. I scan the book (which is much larger than my scanner), edit it in photoshop and copy it into DL (very lickable). If I want to edit the image later, I would have to find the UUID of the book and then open the jpg found in the "Plain Covers" Folder.

If I quit DL, change the names of the xml files, open DL (now with a different library) the book cover, that I worked so hard, on is now gone because DL will delete unused images.

[Delicious Monster]

Pretty much, and with good reason.

The UUID is a record ID that is created when the record is created. Creating two different records creates two different UUIDs, otherwise they wouldn't be unique, and otherwise you couldn't have two copies of the same book with slightly different information. Admittedly, it's unlikely two copies of the same book will have different covers, but they might. You might be duplicating a book as a starting point for a slightly different book, say an older edition that had a different cover.

The UUIDs are associated with their records in the XML. The images use the UUIDs because it's convenient for Delicious Library. If, in your hacking, you make it look like the records are deleted, their images will get deleted. Otherwise you'd leak hard drive space and make the filesystem even slower.

These systems are not very user friendly because they are not intended to be looked at by users. You are supposed to have one library per account, and save your PSD files for future editing. You're not supposed to swap data folders around and muck around in the images folder, or things get messy. That's why they call it hacking.

As a long time ignorer of "supposed to," let me tell you the cardinal rule: before you get your hack up, get your back up.

-- Mike

[cMonster]

TIP: If you use more then one library, do not change the XML file names, change the DL folder name, that way all your images remane intact.