Ok, sure. Screenshot of what?
I suppose @drzoidberg33 would like to see what you actually see inside Plex.
The app you’re using to verify embedded metadata seems to be looking for file properties, not metadata.
Check out Subler which is available for macOS to see the embedded metadata.
The collections you’re seeing?
I thnk this thread has jumped the shark and lost the plot. It’s currently focusing on how the file is created. I do not care how the file is created. Under no circumstances do I want Plex to automatically create collections. I don’t care about the. meta tags.
All of the files are movies and have the mp4 extension. Let’s assume that the Album tag is populated. Fine. I don’t really care and it really doesn’t matter for the question I’ve been asking.
I currently have the “Automatically Create Collections” set to disabled (see below), but have also had it set to the various number values up to 4. Regardless of value, a collection with a single file is being created for every movie I upload.
I told you above
If these are mp4 files, use a metadata editor and look for the presence of an
Albummeta tag. Plex will automatically create a collection named after the content of that tag.
If you don’t want this to happen, don’t use files with embedded Album meta tag.
(or switch to using MKV files instead, because Plex doesn’t read tags from these)
If your mp4 files have data in the album field, plex will create collections with it, regardless of your setting, since it populates the collection field in plex with the data in the album field in the metadata. (If prefer local metadata is enabled)
The setting you’re referring to tells plex to fill that field with the collection name when the criteria is met. You already have it filled, so there’s a collection.
Two things to note:
1: Anyone can answer this, but does this only happen if “Prefer local metadata” is enabled on the library? If it is turned off, would Plex ignore the “Album” tag going forward? Or is this “Album” tag always read regardless, and the problem only recently started up for the OP because their files started filling in this metadata recently (such as an update to DVDFab)?
2: Once this issue is “resolved” (either by disabling local metadata or removing the tag from current files and preventing it going forward), the OP is going to need to delete these collections. I think that by doing so however, Plex might lock the “Collections” field, and the OP is going to want to go into each affected movie and disable this lock. In the future, if you have automatic collections enabled, it might create a collection for these movies, but it will fail to place any movie in which this collection field is locked.
