How does Plex assign existing video preview thumbnails to renamed files?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

I recently ran into an issue where I added 50 episodes of a series as a single season (S01E01-S01E50) in error, before realizing that it was actually 2 separate seasons.

Plex showed metadata for episodes 1-25 but nothing for 26-50, as expected.

I went in, renamed S01E25 thru S01E50 to S02E01 thru S02E25, then I did a library rescan. It added the second season proper, redetected intros, but then it never generated video preview thumbnails. I played the ‘newly added’ episodes, though, and they all had video preview thumbnails. Does Plex have a mechanic to figure out that the files were renamed and ‘remap’ those video preview thumbnails to the newly added library items? How does it do that?

If this is by design that’s cool… I just never thought it would be that easy?

2

Yes. It is computing a “hash” value to recognize a file which has been renamed (but is otherwise unchanged.

3

That’s awesome, good to know!

4

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