So, at first, I was really excited about collections, except I discovered that it was automatically turned on and that it automatically turned on the option Use collection info from The Movie Database. Now, I have tons of tags for collections that I do not want and will need to pick through thousands of movies, individually, to get rid of before i can, effectively, use Collections.
Before this gets out of beta, I’d highly recommend not having any of it on by default. That’s just bad form in general, and seems disastrous for this feature in specific.
So, now that the damage is done, is there any way to easily remove all the collections tags without having to go through thousands of movies and TV shows, one by one?
from that perspective I’m glad I already deactivated Use collection info from The Movie Database pretty early when I started using collections for filtering.
From what I’ve seen, there’s no easy way where you’re dealing with single-movie collections (edit each one and delete the collection tag; afterwards delete the collection too). For collections with multiple movies you can at least select all movies in this selection and remove the tag from all of them at once.
In order to somehow streamline this process, I recommend to do this in collection view.
This way you at least don’t have to check every single movie / show. Btw… for TV shows you can stick with the actual shows… there’s no collection tag on an episode level.
I’ve found that I can sort by collection, even with collections turned off, and that makes it a little easier, as it will then show me the movie(s) in collections and I can select and edit them, but after an hour, I’m barely into BR, and I didn’t even THINK about TV shows! Ugh…
I’m also finding that, not only are a ton of them one movie collections, but some of them are pretty dumb.
I know Plex didn’t create this data. Users created this data, and sometimes, it shows.
In theory the benefit of the automatically added collection tags in addition to the new extended collections is that Plex could extend the agent to not only download the name but also posters and descriptions – potentially even more.
However seeing the quality of many of those collections… that might be wishful thinking.
good news… unless you actively changed your tv shows agent to The Movie Database, you should be good (no collections coming from TVDB).
I tried this once before, and I swear, it didn’t work, but it is now!
So, I removed some manually. I then wanted to make sure they wouldn’t come back, so I ran a refresh Metadata, and, not only do they not come back, but they are getting rid of the Collections tag data from The Movie Database!!!
Now, because it didn’t work before, I’ll take this slowly and make sure that they don’t start to come back in a few days or anything else weird, but this may be it!
@BigWheel: if a metadata refresh after removing the Use collection info from The Movie Database option will remove those auto-created collection tags… maybe this hint could be added to your post in the tips & tricks section?
That is an awesome idea. I think I’ll wait until morning, and run a Scan Library Files and then an Analyse and maybe a refresh again, just to be 100% sure. I do tech support/troubleshooting/breaking new stuff for a living, so I kinda like to try to break it as much as possible before committing, but I have a good feeling about this one.
Also, I need to figure out where the definitive post on Collections is so I can make some suggestions or find out if they’ve already been made. Being able to select, for each collection, if they should be ordered inline or filtered to the top and if the movies in that collection should show inline or not would be awesome.
Maybe test it with a collection that only has one or two items but I have found that if I go to the collection page and use the elipse to delete the collection, it will delete it AND remove the value from the collection area of the movie also. Not sure if it is supposed to do all at the same time, but I have found it to work.
@rbeatse said:
Maybe test it with a collection that only has one or two items but I have found that if I go to the collection page and use the elipse to delete the collection, it will delete it AND remove the value from the collection area of the movie also. Not sure if it is supposed to do all at the same time, but I have found it to work.
That’s not a bad idea to test, but, forgive me for putting it this way, I’M not going to allow all that metadata to be redownlaoded just so I can test it out. It took hours, so, I’m moving forward.
However, troubleshooting, problem management, and documentation is what i do for a living, so, I may make a test library later and see. Maybe.
@rbeatse said:
Maybe test it with a collection that only has one or two items but I have found that if I go to the collection page and use the elipse to delete the collection, it will delete it AND remove the value from the collection area of the movie also. Not sure if it is supposed to do all at the same time, but I have found it to work.
@rbeatse said:
Maybe test it with a collection that only has one or two items but I have found that if I go to the collection page and use the elipse to delete the collection, it will delete it AND remove the value from the collection area of the movie also. Not sure if it is supposed to do all at the same time, but I have found it to work.
Yes, it is supposed to do that.
Sweet. I would say that I wish I had know that days ago, however, picking this apart, piece by piece, is also fun! And, hopefully, helpful.
So, that leads to my next issue/discovery.
After having all the tags removed, automatically, the collections remain. All empty, but still there.
Unless I am missing a page, I am on the Collections page, I’m in my library and selected Collections under the Drop down menu, but there is no obvious way to delete them. Pic attached.
This is happening now, as I type, so I have not yet tried anything else to try to prompt Plex to automatically remove them. I may try an Analyze on the library, which will also take forever, or clean the database?
What do you think may be the best course of action right now?
Open the collection, click on the three dots (ellipses) and choose delete. They didn’t automatically delete them when there was nothing in them in case you were removing some to add others.
@BrianSmith said:
This is happening now, as I type, so I have not yet tried anything else to try to prompt Plex to automatically remove them.
They won’t get removed automatically. You must delete them explicitly.
The delete button will only appear if you enable ‘Media deletion’ in the server configuration.
(This is a bug in the web app, it will be resolved with a web app update.)
@BrianSmith said:
This is happening now, as I type, so I have not yet tried anything else to try to prompt Plex to automatically remove them.
They won’t get removed automatically. You must delete them explicitly.
The delete button will only appear if you enable ‘Media deletion’ in the server configuration.
(This is a bug in the web app, it will be resolved with a web app update.)
That worked. Now, I can begin playing with collections!
I ensured that they were all empty before deleting them, but I hope/assume that if a collection was not empty, it would not delete the media files as well…?
@BrianSmith said:
I ensured that they were all empty before deleting them, but I hope/assume that if a collection was not empty, it would not delete the media files as well…?
No, of course not.
Just make sure you have indeed the poster of a collection and not a movie in front of you
I’d advise you to disable the ‘media deletion’ preference, once you are done.
I’ll go checkout and discuss in the appropriate features area, but, while I’m here, from what I am seeing now, my use of Collections will be a little limited, but, if we ever get the ability to decide to hide or not hide movies in a collection based on the collection and not just the library as a whole, I can see a greatly expanded use for collections. Of course, it’s brand new and in beta, and that’s what beta is all about, right?
It took hours, so, I’m moving forward.
