Automatic Collections Keep Popping Up Despite Turning Off In Settings

Server Version#:4.57.4
Player Version#: All?

Hello! My end goal: to create my own collections but to have no other automated collections popping up in my Movie library. No matter what I try, Plex keeps generating (recreating) the same automated collections over and over. Please help!

Here is what I have tried so far:

  • I checked the file-level metadata. There does not appear to be anything about collections here.

  • The “Use collection info from The Movie Database” box is left unchecked under Movies > Manage Library > Edit > Advanced.

  • The “Use collection info from The Movie Database” box is left unchecked under Settings > Agents > Movies > Plex Movie Legacy > Settings and > The Movie Database > Settings.

  • I am currently using Plex Movie (Legacy) NOT Plex Movie as my agent. So the “minimum collection size” setting does not even appear here, and so I’m assuming should not even be an issue. Right?

What am I missing? Thanks in advance for your help.

The meta tag is not called “collection”.
It is called “album”.

@OttoKerner Thank you for your quick response! Good to know. However, I really don’t have ANY metadata listed for most of my movies. For example, my three Cars movies (Cars, Cars 2 and Cars 3) have virtually no metadata (and now I have checked “Album” specifically) but they still get grouped together into a “Cars” collection. I’m thinking that this has to be some functionality within Plex that is doing that.

Please go to one of the affected movies.
Copy the content of the guid="... property from the Plex XML info

Listed where?
How are you checking?

I was looking at the files with a metadata reader/editor called Kid3. Maybe this isn’t the right tool? Using it, I can see that Cars 2 has metadata listed like Title, Genre, Date and Artist (but not Album), while the other two Cars movies do not really have much listed at all.

Here is the guid="… property info for Cars 3 (Kid3 shows no metadata for this movie except for Encoder Settings).

guid=“com.plexapp.agents.imdb://tt3606752?lang=en”

@OttoKerner I can see this Collection line (below) in the XML for Cars 3, but I’m not sure where it is coming from nor how to change it or avoid it when adding new files:

<Collection id="66038" filter="collection=66038" tag="Cars" count="3"/>

Thanks, this confirms your use of the legacy Plex Movie agent.
Unfortunately, this one won’t be getting any updates or bugfixes anymore.

All you can do is to perform these steps to try and get some old stuck configuration in the old agents “rattled free”: [HowTo] Reset metadata agent preferences to defaults and whack caches

(You might want to take a few notes or screenshots of your agent configuration before doing this.)

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