Coming in late to this thread, but wanted to reply to this specific note based on my recent experience. To relocate my media I have been following the copy-scan-delete-scan-empty trash procedure with mostly good success. However, on occasion the scan after the initial copy wouldn’t link the item in the new location with the item in the original location. In other words, I was not left with a single item in the library with a ‘2’ indicator (as desired), but rather two separate items that have identical media content but different metadata (sometimes different in non-obvious ways). Deleting the original item left only the new one, meaning I had to update the metadata, poster, etc. (as well as losing viewing history) as others have experienced.
I found I could remedy this before deleting the original and emptying the trash, by doing the following:
- Go to the library view in the Plex UI and switch to list view (easier to see what’s happening than grid view) and sort by name
- Find the the two items (original and new)
- Select the original item first (important) and then select the new item
- Choose the Merge action and confirm, then deselect the newly merged single item
This has the effect of linking the new item to the old item, preserving all the metadata (including viewing history) of the original. You can then delete the original and empty the trash, and the new item will retain the desired metadata.
I can understand why modifying the database might be more convenient when lots of copied/moved media are affected, but hopefully this will help people who have only a relative handful of mismatched items after the copy/move. I’ve moved libraries with thousands of items and typically end up with 10 or so items that need to be ‘fixed’ as above, typically items where I have customized metadata and the matching algorithm doesn’t think the new item is the same as the old. Anyway, I hope this helps.
