Feature Suggestion: Autoswap Title/Author and search for unmatched books

[Richs]

Suppose a user has just added large number of books to Calibre and wants to download metadata. Would it be possible to set a toggle somewhere in settings that enables Calibre to automatically search each unmatched title for a second time with the Title and Author fields swapped?

[unboggling]

Why not first swap them before metadata download? You'll have to swap them sooner or later, might as well do it sooner.

Personally, I would swap them automatically during the Add Books process. Try the optional plugin Quick Preferences, which has regular expressions for adding books with different filename structures.

[Adoby]

An alternative could be to use the ISBN-plugin and ignore title/author for books with found ISBN. When downloading metadata the ISBN is used to identify the book, and author/title is ignored.

If no ISBN is found, then you may have to fix author/title to make sure that correct metadata is downloaded. But most books have ISBN available to find using the ISBN-plugin.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Adoby

An alternative could be to use the ISBN-plugin and ignore title/author for books with found ISBN.

To reduce any confusion the OP may have I believe Adobe is referring to the Extract ISBN plugin.

[unboggling]

Now that I think about it some more, at some point I would want the filenames of all original downloaded files reset too. Generally I only add a few books at a time so I change the filenames out in the operating system manually before the Add. Or prior to adding a large quantity of books in bulk, out in the operating system I would run the files that need author/title swap through a file renamer tool before the Add Books.

That way I have the raw downloaded files in preferred filename structure before the Add, one static Add Books regular expression puts Title and Author into the right columns when the copy is Added, and then I can move the original downloaded files (in preferred filename structure) to a Raw Books folder for future life as "raw backup".