[Starson17]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

It would be accepted and it is needed but skills I can't help you with.

That's OK, I don't mind picking up the skills myself, they just take time, and I'm not there yet.

Currently options for selecting what metadata to grab are under the plugins. Specifically metadata download plugins. I go to each of the three plugins now and uncheck tags so I don't end up with a million tags. Having boxes for author and title would be a nice touch.

Thank you for this comment! I've been digging through the code and through the main interface, but it hadn't really dawned on me that the customizations for these plugins is where these options for title/author would be expected to be found. Now that I've looked at them, I see that with the current design, this is exactly where they would be. In fact, I can see that the location of the code change I posted above affects only downloads from the single_metadata screen, not multiple automated metadata updates, whereas if I made the change at the plugins (as Kovid suggested) it would have effect for both single and multiple updates.

Perhaps you could take your original post and open up a Calibre enhancement ticket clearly stating the goal.

I thought of that, but I didn't want to ask someone else to do work for me when the code is available for me to do it myself. Plus, I'm still exploring the nooks and crannies of the interface (as in I hadn't even understood that the plugin customization is where this would go) so it's still premature.

Thanks for the info. If it ever gets implemented I'm sure many folks will use this feature.

Thank you for the info! One reason I posted here was to gauge whether there was any interest in this feature. Another was to try to elicit comments for how it should work. Your post has helped with both. I will probably keep on hacking around in the code, just to familiarize myself, then maybe I will be in a position to make a very clear improvement request, with some possible code that someone with greater skill could look over and correct or improve (as Kovid did with my last tiny proposed code segment).

I actually spent a lot of time in the plugin module code for the fetchers, but it was heavy going until I read some more on Python and PyQT4.

On your point of "clearly stating the goal" that's always half the battle. I'm not even sure I full understand the way Google, ISBNDB and Amazon plugins currently interact. I had thought that two of them were used to find the ISBN, and the third was used for everything else. However, it's clear from the plugin customizations that all three provide ratings, descriptions and tags.

I think what would work well is to set a default in these plugins that allows the title or author to be overwritten (or not) during a metadata download and then allow the default to be overridden with a checkbox at the single_metadata download screen.

This post is long and rambling enough, however, one last point - if anyone wants to implement this, or make an enhancement request, please do so, and don't wait for me.