Recently Plex started magically creating collections for any movie uploaded to the server. I’ve looked through the settings to figure out what changed, but cannot see anything obvious.
I have minimum automatic collection size set to 4, but even for a single file a collection is created for it. Luckily they are easy to find as they are all caps, I’d rather not have to delete them after any file upload.
Any good ideas?
I’m pretty sure those are collections coming from TMDB.
I’m willing to go with that, but how do I stop it?
That I do not know
ha. Ok. I’ll dig for it. 
Are you using any 3rd party tools like Kometa or Agregarr?
If these are mp4 files, use a metadata editor and look for the presence of an Album meta tag. Plex will automatically create a collection named after the content of that tag.
No 3rd party tools. Just Plex.
The file is an MP4, but I don’t see any metadata tags in the files. Also, only started a few weeks ago and there are hundreds of MP4 files in the same directory that were uploaded with no issue.
Which tool do you use to check?
The Windows file explorer is inadequate.
I use mp3tag
I use a mac and use the mdls command.
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 2026-07-01 17:45:13 +0000
kMDItemFSCreationDate = 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000
kMDItemFSCreatorCode = “”
kMDItemFSFinderFlags = 0
kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon = 0
kMDItemFSInvisible = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden = 0
kMDItemFSIsStationery = 0
kMDItemFSLabel = 0
kMDItemFSName = “Dumb and Dumber (1994).mp4”
kMDItemFSNodeCount = 1499834782
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = 20
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID = 501
kMDItemFSSize = 1499834782
kMDItemFSTypeCode = “”
Also opened up the file in VLC and looked at the metadatata there. The album field is blank.
I wonder if these “movies” are not actually movies, but something else.
And putting them all into the same folder might mess with their matching.
Are you using a custom metadata agent? and/or the .nfo agent?
Are there .nfo files present?
I missed a word there… Don’t see an Album metadata tag filled in.
All movies. In fact, all rips from DVD’s using DVDFab.
The collection is created with the name of the movie from the DVD, but I’m not adding any metadata and there are no nfo files.
It is possible that DVDFab had a release a few weeks ago that is causing this. I will go back to them too.
That smells like something your software might be embedding. Are you sure that your metadata tool is showing you all meta tags?
Are there .nfo files present in the same folder as the video files?
No NFO files. I have metadata tag function disabled from the ripper tool. So, no metadata being created.
I’ll keep playing with Plex and see if i can find it. Thanks for the help.
Please post a screenshot of what you’re seeing, that would really help everyone get on the same page.
The all caps for all of them is odd since that wouldn’t be coming from TMDB…
Seems others have experienced this with DVDFab…maybe need to use another tool to dig into the embedded metadata: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/piQgK1zLAG
