Quote:
Originally Posted by Deepfire
Firewall did not work. Calibre CAN download metadata, just not the covers. So I guess it is not really totally blocked?
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I also had, just at first, a problem downloading covers in v.6 (6.1) I don't recall having had before (with any version < 6). As in your case, downloading just metadata worked though.
My problem seems to have been different than yours, but I did learn interesting things about how the process works. In my case I got an error (I didn't unfortunately save the exact error message) from the Google Images covers search, that stated something about the Search URL used being malformed.
I kept getting the same error, until at some point it vanished. I noticed then the log tends to say:
"Metadata sources cache was recently updated not updating again"
I wonder how long the min interval is? It at any rate seems my problem got solved when the cache did get updated at some point.
Since I personally had never done it, it took me a while to find the options for metadata and cover download in the first place, and learn what they are for
To set them, go to:
Preferences > Sharing > Metadata download
I read kovidgoyal's post that said that even if a specific metadata/cover source fails, the app will still try to use the other sources. Nonetheless, not having known about it, I found it useful that one optimize the download order of the sources using the Cover priority fields.
Also, if a specific source is giving errors, one may want to temporarily uncheck it as a source. I currently use these settings:
Metadata sources
Source, Cover priority
[x] Amazon.com, 4
[ ] Big Book Search, 5
[ ] Edelweiss, 6
[x] Google, 2
[x] Google Images, 1
[x] Open Library, 3
I think I maybe also changed the timeout settings. At any rate they are now:
Max. time to wait after first match is found: 30 secs
Max. time to wait after first cover is found: 40 secs
Still another thing. I found two ways to download covers. You can either right-click a book and select Edit metadata > Download metadata and covers, and then there are multiple options, but say choose Download only covers. Assuming it works, you'll get a notification in the bottom-right area "Metadata download complete".
I saw the Google cache related error messages when I clicked View log at this point. Is a copy of this log saved automatically in %TEMP% (in Windows of course), I couldn't find it? The dialog lets one copy the log to the clipboard, which is very nice, but I didn't unfortunately save the text after taking a look at it
Anyway, if you press Review downloaded metadata, it seems even if Calibre does find many covers, it selects one of them (the largest?) which one may either accept or not.
However, if one doesn't like the cover suggestion, there's another way that lets you manually select which cover to use from all the search results. To do this, right-click the book and select > Edit metadata > Edit metadata individually. Then click Download cover. It shows each cover the search found and you can click which one you want to use as the cover (or Cancel, of course).
So all in all, I personally had a merely transient problem, and both the metadata and cover download features work perfectly atm