Feature request: disabling unused fields

[lathom]

I would like to be able to "disable" some of the standard metadata fields to prevent them from being populated and displayed in the tag browser and content server. Allowing them to be deleted would certainly work just as well, but I understand that messing with the base/default database structure would be complicated.

In my case, I do not use the Publisher and Rating fields and have turned them off in all the download metadata configurations, but they still get populated when I bulk import books, either from an associated opf file or from the book file itself. Searching them out and bulk editing metadata to clear these fields is straightforward, but it's annoying to have to keep doing it. Would it be possible to have a tweak available that just told calibre to ignore any data in selected standard fields when importing/downloading metadata?

Thanks!

[chaley]

You seem to be asking for two different things: hiding fields and not populating certain fields when doing imports.

You can already do the first: hide fields both on the main display and in the tag browser. For the main display, see preferences -> add your own columns and uncheck those that you don't want to see. For the tag browser, right-click on the category and select "hide".

To my knowledge, the second is not currently possible. I don't know if any developer will be interested in doing the second.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by lathom

I do not use the Publisher and Rating fields and have turned them off in all the download metadata configurations, but they still get populated when I bulk import books

I beliieve your only option is to go to Preferences - Adding books and uncheck Read metadata from file contents rather than file name. When adding books this will cause calibre to extract metadata from the file name and ignore the metadata in the book itself.

[travger]

Everybody has different needs, I would happily delete 'Ratings' but 'Publisher' is somewhat interesting for me.
I understand that it is now possible to change the order of custom fields (have not tried it yet), but I would be exstatic if I could banish 'Ratings' from the first page (and replace it with 'Genre' for example).

[itimpi]

As was mentioned earlier, under Preferences->Interface->Add Your Own Columns you can control excatly what columns show in the main page, and also their order.