How to stop Tags Merging

[potestus]

Hi,
I notice that tags now merge with those already in the book.
Since I have now tidied up my tags/genres using goodreads etc. I want to switch off this merging of strgane tags into my tag-pool when I import new books.

Where to I change kit back to overwriting?

Regards.

[kiwidude]

Tags merging has been the traditional calibre behaviour, it was just that such behaviour got "broken" with calibre 0.8 changes. It was me that requested Kovid restore the original behaviour. The reason is that many people like myself put their own values into the tags field, like indicating wish list items, books they have read etc. Having your own tags overwritten when the tags column was the "traditional" approach to storing extra information about your books was too destructive and dangerous. Particularly if say you were doing a metadata download to update some other fields and had forgotten you had the tags column ticked. There is no undo feature in calibre, and to accidentally lose sometimes important information by overwriting for many users is not the right thing to be doing IMHO.

I did suggest to Kovid the option of a controllable setting but he chose to just fix the behaviour. There is no way to change it back to overwriting. However I would suggest that should rarely be a problem? As if you are adding new books they should not have tags to overwrite. If you are cleaning up your library and your books have tags that you want to replace with a metadata download, just select them, hit E and tick the Remove all tags checkbox.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

However I would suggest that should rarely be a problem? As if you are adding new books they should not have tags to overwrite.

Many books have preloaded tags. I was actually enjoying the tag overwrite feature. But it is almost as easy to delete tags prior to updating the metadata.

[kiwidude]

Ahh yes. I always keep the "Read metadata from file contents rather than file name" unchecked since most books contain garbage data internally, but yes you are right, that could add tags.

As you say, it is trivial to remove them. What is not trivial is to "recover" lost tags for those who did not want them overwritten.

[speakingtohe]

I have 8002 tags which is not an ideal situation by any means. Periodically I take a stab at weeding out a few hundred (I had 11,000+ at one time), all from within books or from metadata downloads.

Still, like kiwidude, I was disconcerted to have my tags overwritten, and be left with a single tag usually genre.

many (perhaps most) of my tags are repetitive and useless but I still get a lot of use from the tag function.

Recently I read a steampunk novel and was looking for more. I only had 1 book tagged steampunk and that was the one I had read, so I clicked on Victorian and control clicked on urban fantasy and voila I had a few more

IMO too many tags are better than not enough.

Helen

[potestus]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Many books have preloaded tags. I was actually enjoying the tag overwrite feature. But it is almost as easy to delete tags prior to updating the metadata.

Ye it is ok if you are doing one at a time - however with a bulk upload it can be problematic.
I would like to have a switch.
I have 210 tags/genres and am happy.

[potestus]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Many books have preloaded tags. I was actually enjoying the tag overwrite feature. But it is almost as easy to delete tags prior to updating the metadata.

Ye it is ok if you are doing one at a time - however with a bulk upload it can be problematic.
I would like to have a switch.
I have 210 tags/genres and 4300 books .