[DNSB]

Originally Posted by toolman

Metadata not showing up after importing books into Calibre. Metadata shows up in the windows file explorer Calibre folder.
I have to go into Calibre edit metadata and download metadata to get it to show up.
Is there a setting i have wrong? It happens on EPUB, AZW3, Mobi

Even if there is little to no metadata available when adding an ebook, calibre will create a metadata.opf file. The presence of that file does not indicate that calibre is hiding metadata from you.

I imported a pdf file (release notes for GlobalProtect). Basically about 13 lines of "meaningful" metadata. The rest was empty custom columns, empty descriptions, etc. The only "metadata" that pdf file supplied was the document title.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<package xmlns="http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf" unique-identifier="uuid_id" version="2.0">
    <metadata xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:opf="http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf">
        <dc:identifier opf:scheme="calibre" id="calibre_id">8871</dc:identifier>
        <dc:identifier opf:scheme="uuid" id="uuid_id">99aad904-a064-470d-8b15-5adea0646399</dc:identifier>
        <dc:title>GlobalProtect™ App Release Notes</dc:title>
        <dc:creator opf:file-as="Unknown" opf:role="aut">Unknown</dc:creator>
        <dc:contributor opf:file-as="calibre" opf:role="bkp">calibre (4.14.0) [https://calibre-ebook.com]</dc:contributor>
        <dc:date>2020-04-22T19:10:58+00:00</dc:date>
        <dc:language>eng</dc:language>
        <meta content="{&quot;Unknown&quot;: &quot;&quot;}" name="calibre:author_link_map"/>
        <meta content="2020-04-27T18:29:17.162000+00:00" name="calibre:timestamp"/>
        <meta content="GlobalProtect™ App Release Notes" name="calibre:title_sort"/>
        <meta name="calibre:user_metadata:#author_sort" content="{&quot;is_multiple2&quot;: {}, &quot;colnum&quot;: 1, &quot;is_multiple&quot;: null, &quot;rec_index&quot;: 22, &quot;is_custom&quot;: true,

[multiple lines of place holders for empty information removed]
    </metadata>
    <guide>
        <reference href="cover.jpg" title="Cover" type="cover"/>
    </guide>
</package>

Quite a few epubs that I own came with the absolute minimum of metadata which are dc:identifier, dc:title, and dc:language. Anything else is not required by the epub specification.