Server Version#: 1.40.2.8395
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.125.1
I’m tryng to identify the exact piece of data that Plex uses to display the year of a home movie. These are all .MP4 movies located in an “Other Videos” library. Scanner = Plex Video Files Scanner. Agent = Personal Media. Plex is running on my TrueNAS Scale device.
I’ve searched through posts and this question has been asked before. Some suggest its a file date (modified, created, etc.) Some suggest its a metadata tag. I’ve changed them all using exiftool and BulkFileChanger but for some reason Plex still puts 2024 as the year even when I’ve altered the file data to reflect otherwise. I know that I can manually edit each video within the Plex GUI, but I’ve got 100’s of them so that’s not going to be practical.
It’s been some time since I’ve added a family video.
From what I remember, these scenarios worked for me in the past:
file creation date is considered if no other datapoints are available — but only during initial scan (also not super helpful if the files were digitalized from legacy media)
year included in the file name, following the official naming schema for movies (e.g. Family Holiday (2012)) — this will only pick up the year, no detailed dates
embedded metadata, using the „release date“ tag (name might slightly vary depending on what app / container format you’re using); I’m using Subler on macOS which allows entering a year or full date / time, e.g. 2014, 2014-06-13, 2024-06-13T14:10:50Z
I think I have it. I needed to enable local media assets under my home movies library and move it to the top of the list. Once I did that, a metadata refresh did the trick.
