I have been having a discussion with a friend who also uses Plex about file naming conventions. In my case, even is very rigidly named and carefully sorted. However, in his case, stuff is a mess leading to many duplicate movies. For example, let’s say that in my movies folder I have these two movies (they are actually the same movie, but different file names):
My Movie (2023) [Blu-Ray]
My Movie (2023) [NetFlix]
Plex will see both of these movies but there is no visual clue that I have noticed in the GUI that this movie is present twice. In the GUI, the movie shows up just once. If I choose to view details of this movie, I can see that there are actually two file names associated with this movie, but that would mean having to drill down through hundreds of movies to look for duplicates.
When movies are in a collection, the GUI clearly shows how many items are in that collection, but in a situation like the above, Plex does not create a collection automatically even though it clearly understands that both of those movies are in fact the same movie.
You may be thinking that in my example above, duplicates are easy to find because you would simply need to look at a directory listing, and you would see that there are in fact two movies that start with “My Movie (2023)”. However, that example was an oversimplification. In reality, the file names are different enough that the movies don’t show up next to each other in a directory listing making duplicates very difficult to spot.
So here is my question: When Plex groups multiple files together into one movie as I described above, is there any visual way to determine that what is showing as one movie actually has multiple files associated with it?
