Avoid adding every film to its own collection

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.40.3.8555
Player Version#: 4.129.1

Is there any way to stop every single film I add to my library being added to a collection of its own? I end up with all these pointless single-film collections which I have to remove manually.

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Yup, there is a setting specifically available to avoid this.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/advanced-settings-plex-movie-agent/

“Minimum automatic collection size” - set this to the number of movies of a collection that need to be in your library before the collection is created. This won’t affect existing collections but will prevent it from happening going forward.

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Thanks for the swift response. That sounds like just what I need (although it was very hard to find the setting - I didn’t think to look in the settings for the Library itself).
Unfortunately it hasn’t worked as yet. I set the “Minimum automatic collection size” to 2, then added Paddington 2, and find myself with a collection containing only Paddington 2. Perhaps it takes a while to come into effect?

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Are your movies in mp4 files?
If they are, check them for embedded Album meta tags.
Plex will create a collection, named after the content of the Album meta tag.

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That was it! Thank you, I would never have thought of that - it seems like rather an obscure feature, more suited to music that movies.
Anyway, I prepare my films with ffmpeg and simply added -metadata album=“” to sort it out

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Well, objectively there usually are no “albums” of movies anyway. So it begs the question why the album tag is populated in all your files.

But there are sometimes “box sets” or “collections” of movies, which either are sequels of each other, or play in the same universe etc.
Hence using the album metatag for these appears to be reasonable.

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