I’ve tried to search for this, and I’ve tried many recommendation and after all these years, I can’t believe how intricate it is to be able to move items around in plex. It’s almost frustrating.
I love the “Recently Added” display, however, it’s also the bane of my plex existence.
After all this time, why can we not control what shows in here better?
My scenario is:
I am trying to consolidate 3 libraries into 1 library. Two smaller ones into the third. I want to:
retain watch status
have them NOT show up in the recently added display for library 3 (in this case).
In the past I was successful at moving a library from one drive to a new larger drive, and was able to retain all that with the info I found. Slightly a pain, but was able to do it (once again this should not be a pain)
Also I did use a db editor to edit movies manually to not display in the recently added section, but I should not have to do this for such an easy request. This makes me nervous, as one bad edit in the db…and well…
Today all I wanted to do was move a dozen movies from 2 different libraries into a 3rd…all instructions I found did not completely work. I was able to keep watch setting, however, for the life of me I couldn’t get them to not show in the recently added display. Yeah I could edit the DB again, but there has to be a simpler way.
From my searches I’ve yet to find a solid answer for this scenario.
All my libraries use the same agent…
1 is easy. The history is based on the agent used to match the video, so as long as you use the same agent, the history should automatically carry over.
2 is not possible. Recently Added is based on when something is added to a library. There isn’t a way to carry this over from 1 library to another, except by modifying the database.
Hey thanks for replying!
I’m not sure how that makes sense if “1 is easy.” If it knows about the video, and knows it’s watched status, wouldn’t it already be in a database?
All that was changed the physical location (and library) location…
If that is the case, then I still have to lean on my frustration with the Recently Added feature and the lack of control.
The video information is stored in a Plex database. This includes the guid (based on agent), the library it’s in, the date it was added to the database, and the metadata. You can have the same movie in another library with the same guid and it’s own added date and it’s own metadata.
When just scanning files, Plex wouldn’t know if it finds the same movie in another library, if it should reuse the old metadata or if this is meant to be a second separate entry, so it takes the safer route and creates a new entry so it doesn’t affect the old one. I believe there is a feature request to allow doing this from within Plex but there isn’t a way to do that now.
The watched history is based solely on the guid. It doesn’t care what library it came from, since it doesn’t need to track metadata. This allows you to add/remove/move files around and the watched history is always kept. Doing the same type of thing with the metadata would meant you couldn’t have different versions of the same movie/show. Some users used this separation to have different versions of movies (director’s cuts, tv version vs theatrical, 4k, 3d, etc.).
Thanks for explaining this, hopefully it will help someone else in the future too.
Do you happen to know the feature request mentioned?
I’d like to see if it covers what my imagination is thinking
Also, in your opinion what’s the current easiest (most recommended) way to edit the “Recently Added” listing? Is it manually editing the date in the DB directly as I’ve done in the past? …or is there a ‘tool’ out there that I can use to do this? There always has to be a better way!
There is a “Remove from Continue Watching” option, why not a “Remove from Recently Added” one too?
Have you tried to edit the DB recently? I tried today, and am getting “Error changing data: unknown tokenizer: collating” when I try and edit the added_at date in one of my entries.
my plex server is stopped…
Not sure what is going in here, I see rumblings out there on the interweb too…
Thoughts?
EDIT: I found this… now I need to figure out how to get this to work. neither the --sqlite or -sqlite dont appear to do anything for me
So, I don’t know how clear it was, but I don’t edit by invocation of Plex at all. I just use raw sqlite commands on their own. That used to work without any adjustment, but the latest updates break that because of the update triggers. As I explain in this comment, I use explicit commands to remove the triggers so that I can do my updates, then add the triggers back after I’m done.
Ok! I understand what you mean… I will try that. I saw another post in there that explained the removal and replace…
I’ll report back once I get this to work, so that this thread is more complete
