I have deleted a movie collection from the collection tab by mistake, how do I get Plex to scan it back in?
If it was a collection in the Collections tab then the movies are still in your library and you will just need to rebuild the collection manually.
If you’re referring to a few movies in a series, e.g. John Wick 1-4 then you will want to run a scan on the library to pick them back up (assuming they are still on disk).
Yes, they are still on the disk, I have tried the following
Plex Dance
Scan Library Files
Refresh All Metadata
And not appearing back as a collection
It sounds like the automatic collection creation is disabled or the threshold isn’t being met. But also collection matching is hit and miss for me so I make them all manually.
Do the movies appear in the library if you search for them?
Yes they do, mide you I created a Collection manually for Chuck Norris, 23 movies, I guess Chuck Norris movies are not collections, I did remove Chocadile Dundee, 3 movie collection under the collection tab created by Plex, but that didn’t come back either. Maybe I should delete my Movie folder and add everything again ?
Threshold is set to 2 and don’t know why I am getting a few collections with only 1 item.
I’ve found with the new Plex movie agents collections are… not as accurate as they were before… Sometimes missing altogether, and sometimes they have unexpected names.
I suggest you just add the collection back manually in collection tag on each movie. It shouldn’t require a scan at all.
OK, thanks
Hold up! When you delete a collection, Plex deletes the “Collection” tag in the movie itself, and LOCKS THE FIELD so it won’t get the collection back again.
Find the movies that were in the collection and edit them to unlock the field. Then Refresh Metadata on your movies (only those movies, or your entire library, it doesn’t matter) and it should pop up.
The collection tag is filled on a movie when you “refresh metadata”. However, if the collection tag is locked due to a manual change or from deleting the collection, that movie won’t retrieve the collection info on a refresh, and Plex will not create it again.
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All goods, I ended up removing Movies and adding again, once the metadata was completed, I just added certain Actors manually to a collection WOW Jean-Claude Van Damme made 36 movies
Collections for a certain actor or director are easier created with a filter. Saving that creates a smart collection, which updates itself once items come or go that fit the filter criteria.
They are also independent from the “Collection” field in each item’s properties.
Their disadvantage is that they only work within one library and don’t combine across library boundaries.
Yes I have noticed the collections are all over the place now, I have separate folders called Animated Movies and Movies and now the same collections are appearing in both, I guess the Movie folder collections and not showing up in Aminated Movies folder.
Plex treats each library as separate libraries (they are), so there isn’t much cross-communication between them. However, if you create a collection manually in one, then create one with the EXACT same name in the other, Plex can (sometimes) show the contents of the other library’s collection when you view the collection in another library.
This works with Movies and TV Shows as well, such as for Star Wars movies/shows:
(Not seen: The animated Star Wars series in my animated TV Show library)
BTW, I also separate animated movies in one library/folder, and live movies in another. I tell you though, some movies can be hard to categorize like that, such as The Pagemaster, and the Chip N Dale movie (I did animated and live, respectively).
Yes, but you can’t set it to hide the title from the normal library view if it’s a Smart Collection.
I believe this happens, at least with an automatic collection deletion. If I recall, when I first created my library, I set it up to create collections automatically for collections with 1+ movies. Imagine my shock when a few movies I thought were singles were suddenly in a 1-movie collection. It’s because a new sequel movie had been announced, but it hadn’t actually been made, let alone released. I deleted the 1-movie collection, then forgot about it for a few years. When the sequel came out, only the newly added sequel got added to the collection, not the old one. The old movie had its collection field locked.
I think this may only happen on “automatic” collections, not manual collections. To be fair, this isn’t as shocking of a move as you expect. Movies can only be part of one automatic collection, and if you delete that, you most likely do not want the movie to become part of this collection again in the future, so the field locks to prevent a change by a metadata update.
Lock just means that your Plex server itself won’t change it. You can still edit the field to add your own manual collection or multiple collections, or even unlock the field and refresh metadata to get it back.
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Thanks Guys, I’ll just stick with the main Movie folder for collections and skip the Animated Move folder, I’ll delete the 1 items folder from the collections and manually add Actors to the collection, Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris and Van Damme, they are most likely not going to make anymore movies
Might be able to use multi-select to select each movie, edit them in bulk. If you do, toggle the lock icon on the collection tag multiple times, then make sure it is off when you hit apply.
Yeh, I’ve done that, thanks. Just create 1 Movie folder and 1 TV Show folder and create your collection.
You can select one, scroll down a bit, hold Shift and select another, and it selects all movies between the two. You cannot scroll to the very bottom and shift click to select all, as the page doesn’t actually load all movies if you skip past them. So Select the first, page down a few times (Pg Dn), shift select one, page down, shift select one, etc. You can try more page downs until you find an amount that seems to work out well. You might have them all selected in no time.
By the way, what did you do that caused you to lock EVERY movie’s collection tag? The OP had an issue where they deleted one collection, so it’s not too much to select just the movies that were locked…
I bet that, if you were good at SQL, you could write a script to unlock every movie title’s collection tag externally to your server.
Alternatively, you could delete the Library, and recreate it. That would clear the collection lock field (and ANY other custom changes you made to your media 
)
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