limiting collections in automatic management

[Jade Aislin]

When I send to my device, I like having metadata management set to automatic as it fills out the collections I want. However, it gives me more than I really want. For example, I want to have collections for my favorite authors, but not others. I've tried switching to manual to get rid of the unwanted collections. However, if I switch back to automatic, the unwanted collections are recreated, even when those books are in a different library.

Is there a way to limit what calibre will put into collections? If I only want collections for a couple authors, can I tell it to grab authors for collections, but ignore certain values (names)?

[chaley]

Go to the device interface plugin for the device in question (preferences -> plugins -> device interface plugins) and change the "list of fields to turn into collections" to be the fields you want.

Calibre makes collections for all the values in a field. The only way to make a subset is to use another field containing the values you want. In some cases a "column made from other columns" will work.

[Jade Aislin]

So, I should make a custom column that looks for specific authors from the authors column to populate itself?

For example, if I have authors A and B. I set the custom column to look for author A to put in its field. When it goes through the list of authors it pulls author A and leaves author B alone. Then I would have a field that had only the authors I wanted in my collections and could use that custom column to make my collections.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Jade Aislin

So, I should make a custom column that looks for specific authors from the authors column to populate itself?

For example, if I have authors A and B. I set the custom column to look for author A to put in its field. When it goes through the list of authors it pulls author A and leaves author B alone. Then I would have a field that had only the authors I wanted in my collections and could use that custom column to make my collections.

You are describing an "ultimate" solution -- a custom column that contains the items (authors) for whom you want collections made. In this case you would use a "column made from other columns, behaves like tags" so that you could put multiple values in the column. The problem: author names frequently contain commas, making this column type potentially problematic. You can avoid this by changing the commas to semicolons (or something).

If you make a tags-like column that contains names, then you could manually add author names with commas. However, this is a pain because you would need to manually update every book.

If you know in advance the authors, then the best solution is to write a custom template function that extracts those authors, changing characters as needed. Second best would be to write a template in General Program Mode that does the same thing, but this would be much slower. Both solutions require some level of programming know-how.

Apologies, but what you want to do is at the edge of what calibre does. It is possible to achieve, but not easily.