Many directors are listed twice in Plex metadata. How can I fix this problem?

[L_D]

Many of the directors in my movie collection have two metadata entries. I’ve attached an image for clarity. I’ve tried refreshing the metadata on these items. I’ve also selected all of a director’s movies and manually edited and locked the director but they still show up in two entries. Also, very importantly, no movies are shared between the entries. One entry might have 3 movies and the other entry would have 2 different movies. They need to all be merged but I can’t get them to do that.

[tom80H]

For comparison… could you check out the movie details of two movies associated to such a duplicate: in Plex Web, choose Get Info from the movie‘s context menu, then click View XML and search for the director lines — can you post the entire section with that information?

I guess there might be some mismatch with some of the entries being properly matched / using online metadata and person references, while the other is just a local reference (e.g. manually edited director name). This could be linked to a mix of local/embedded vs. online metadata.

Also…. what agent are you using for this library of yours and how is it configured (library context menu > Manage Library > Edit… → Advanced)?

Edit: please also post which version of PMS you’re using and on which platform.

[L_D]

For sure. One other note, this is happening in my Horror library but not my regular Movie library. So it’s not affecting all libraries.

Movie 1:
<Director id="99321" filter="director=99321" tag="Adam Green" thumb="http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/rZQQtRUVxZSDgvkMg7KNPdMPYSw.jpg"/>

Movie 2:
<Director id="480558" filter="director=480558" tag="Adam Green" tagKey="5d77683d54f42c001f8c5b8f" thumb="https://metadata-static.plex.tv/2/people/23e1e7f52de0ea7c86cef20f9937cbc0.jpg"/>

I’m using the “Plex Movie” agent. PMS Version 1.41.2.9200 on Windows 10.

[drzoidberg33]

Refresh metadata for the library.

[tom80H]

I still had this half-finished draft in the editor.

As drzoidberg33 stated, refreshing the library metadata should do the trick. Some of those items appear to still be linked with a legacy agent. Hence, Plex is treating those as different persons.