Many thanks to you all, this helped a lot!
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Originally Posted by eschwartz
You can choose which fields you want to download. Additionally there is an option to "append comments to existing".
But by and large, metadata download is meant to overwrite the current (assumed bad  ) metadata. |
Ok, many thanks for confirming this!
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When using the bulk metadata download (shortcut key is CTRL+D) you can review the metadata, which will be from the better match.
You can manually edit the new metadata (on the left) or press the <- arrow to revert a specific field to the old metadata (on the right).
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This is a good tip! I had not used bulk metadata download before, because I wanted to understand the single "Edit Metadata" download first and assumed that the bulk would be more complicated. But alas, it turns out that the bulk download is in fact easier!
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I usually use the CTRL+D route, but I *thought* in Edit Metadata ==> Download you were supposed to get a choice between metadata from either source, not any kind of aggregate. I could be wrong though, as I said I don't use it enough to say with confidence what should happen.
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I experimented a bit more (with the "Edit Metadata" single downloads), and found that the protocols provide helpful insights: If I use both Goodreads and Amazon as metadata providers for e.g. Dicken's "David Copperfield", then calibre loads
- three results from Amazon
- one result from Goodreads
and the final lines of the protocol say:
Code:
Merging results from different sources and finding earliest publication dates from the worldcat.org service
We have 2 merged results, merging took: 0.62 seconds
And in fact, the subsequent list dialog from which I can choose among the downloaded results only offers two choices, not four, both (mostly) from Amazon, where one result however also mentions a reference to Goodread. The tags seem to have been combined as well.
I think that this is quite surprising and confusing, especially because the single Goodreads result is never mentioned individually. I also understand that I can choose which fields to download, both "globally" and per provider, but not knowing the rules with which the final result is composed leaves me quite unsure. (For example: Does "metadata from the best match" enclose all fields from that match? Or will individual fields from lesser matches still be used, e.g. when the field was excluded from the best match?)
In summary, it seems that with the combination of the bulk download with its table-view and the selection of individual fields per metadata provider can solve my problems/questions.
But if I may make a suggestion: I think that it would be wonderful if metadata download results were presented in a spreadsheet-like table: one column for the old/existing data, and one column for each provider; one row for each field. Then have the user choose for each field (row) which provider's value he/she wishes to overtake (possibly with multi-selection for concatenation). Just a thought.
Again, many thanks to everyone for your help!
Best regards,
Carsten