Is there any way to keep caliber from changing the series number while fetching Meta

[JGB]

I'm using caliber to edit the metadata of a series, the files have the correct numbers, but after fetching, it grabs metadata that doesn't, so they all end up with either 1 or the wrong numbers, is there a way to deselect something like series and have caliber leave that alone?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by JGB

I'm using caliber to edit the metadata of a series, the files have the correct numbers, but after fetching, it grabs metadata that doesn't, so they all end up with either 1 or the wrong numbers, is there a way to deselect something like series and have caliber leave that alone?

If you go to preferences - plugins - metadata download plugins and disable the Librarything plugin you will stop the series data from being overwritten.

Read this thread from post 16 on to understand when and what is happening with your series metadata. Changing your workflow might be better then turning off the plugin.

[kiwidude]

I hadn't seen that other thread before. It's been on my list to do something about in my copy of the source as it drives me up the wall to have my carefully constructed series and tags overwritten by garbage from the metadata sources.

Even "changing workflow" doesn't solve everything, not when you are wanting to use the series names from the filename at import - because that means your "workflow" becomes don't fetch metadata at all.

Also my situation has been that I retrieved metadata for thousands of titles when I first imported them. Then I realised that all the ratings were being averaged too low for my liking until I turned off the ratings from LibraryThing. However I only realised that "much later" so now have a large amount of titles that I would effectively like a "Download only rating" menu option for to get new averages for - not overwriting my carefully setup tags and series like "Get only social metadata" does.

Basically you are out of luck until one day there will be a dialog to control this. Your workflow if you want metadata has to be download it first, then manually go and overwrite the inconsistent garbage when you get it. Then don't EVER retrieve metadata again for that book unless you want to do your data entry all over again.

Turning off series downloading completely isn't a desired option for me because sometimes my filenames don't have the series in the filename and I don't realise there are other books in a series until the metadata tells me there might be.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Basically you are out of luck until one day there will be a dialog to control this.

Being able to selectively download metadata is on Kovid's to-do list so there is light at the end of the tunnel.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Being able to selectively download metadata is on Kovid's to-do list so there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Yeah, sorry I should have made it clearer in my post that I was aware it is on the todo list. In fact that is why I hadn't made changes to my source code before now, waiting to see if the tunnel end was coming up

Looking forward to the day it arrives. There are quite a few "default" settings in Calibre that only in hindsight did I find out that I disagree with. However I only learnt the hard way after several thousand books being imported what their effect was. Having your titles become switched to lower case due to crappy metadata sources, or be completely incorrect due to retrieving from the file metadata, disabling certain plugins, that sort of stuff.

With the benefit of hindsight I should have cut my losses and just started my import all over again but I had already spent a fair bit of time manually cleaning some of them up as I didn't "know" what to change at the time. So now I am going back author by author (with many more books added since then) to clean up the data and that's when overwriting stuff you have manually typed in just to get a missing or revised piece of data like rating becomes most painful.