Server Version#: 1.32.8.7639
Player Version#: 4.119.1
I don’t use collections much however I have noticed something funky. Let me give an example. Peter Jackson’s King Kong movie from 2005 is part of a collection called King Kong (1976) Collection. See Screenshot below as an example:
After some investigation I can see some idiot over at TMDB on Jan 16th 2003 added both of these movies to this collection and then a moderation on Feb 3rd 2003 removed them. See → https://www.themoviedb.org/collection/135498-king-kong-1976-collection/changes for details.
This removal of the movies from the collection has never been updated by my plex server. Looking at xml file on my plex server I can see the collection …
<Collection id="62498" filter="collection=62498" tag="King Kong (1976) Collection" guid="plex://collection/5ec2f5d7d96995004286d1d4" summary="An American giant monster film series remake based on the 1933 film of the same name, about a giant ape that is captured and imported to New York City for exhibition."/>
Force refresh metadata of the movies does not help in removing this bad collection data. Looking through my collections I can see other collection entries with similar problems. My language is set to English (UK) in case that is a factor.
I’m running a test ATM where I have disabling collections in my movie library and force refreshing. Once done, I’ll clean bundles, optimise db and re-enable collections again. I’ll update this thread when its complete.
Thought so. You are in Plex’ hands here. There’s no procedure or UI to change “their” metadata mass collection. I bet that collected data just does not get deleted if the new entry is empty…
In addition to what has already been said here, there is also the issue that collections gets “left behind” as empty if you delete the movies that caused it to be created in the first place.
It seems related, in the sense that collections currently can not be deleted in the background, for any reason. It always has to be done by the user.
Useful reminder!
This is fully intentional. Collections are never deleted, even if they lose all their members. Background is that some users are customizing their collections with posters and descriptions, but don’t have fitting media all the time. i.e. some media which are only stored temporarily, depending on availability or season, etc.
I am not sure if automatically created collections which are fetched from TMDB can be distinguished from manually created ones.
There is room for improvement here.
Thanks @OttoKerner and @d2freak. I did not know this was intentional. I can see why plex would do it that way so thanks for the context. Still, as you say improvement could be done for online creations.
However, I hope a fix can be found when movies are removed from collections at online sources (tmdb). From what I can see no movie which has been removed from a collection has had that tag removed from it in plex. That certainly looks like it needs to be fixed.
I’m sure I c an figure out the table and/or column in the plex db I could nuke and then refresh metadata to get these to forcibly update but I’d rather a fix from plex and will keep that for another day if its not forthcoming.
Just ran a quick test and I’m not sure if this is also intentional. But if you delete a collection the movies which are part of this collection get the tag removed and LOCKED.
I always assumed this was intentionally done, so that the server “remembers” that you don’t want a collection for these specific items.
This is just food for thought, but wouldn’t it work if they are distinguished on whether they have any locked field? This is assuming a manually created collection gets, at minimum, a locked name.
I know the US had a holiday last week however has there been any feedback yet from the team on this ? Really just wondering if a fix will come or if I’ll just go and manually fix this up myself.
There hasn’t been much movement yet on the decision whether to treat automatically created collections differently then regular ones.
For the time being, fix it manually.
