Movie Library Duplicates

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.38.0.2734
Player Version#: Plex for Windows

I recently updated my computer and reinstalled Windows 10 and Plex. When I add the Folder with all my Movies it adds 2 movies. One is the original file with the name and date I added to it and one is labeled with the title and under that it says “1 movie.” I haven’t found any settings to get it to quite adding the second movie. Is there a way to keep it from adding them or a way to delete them more than one at a time?

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I am new here and with Plex so take it for what it is worth … it sounds like it is created a collection for those files it duplicates. I had a similar problem and went through and made sure that all films were in folders as suggested for layout … and had to delete the ones that said 1 file … Be sure your folder/file layout is as required

1 Like
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I suppose dtsig’s analysis is spot on :wink:
You can configure your library to automatically create collections based on information from The Movie Database. The Plex Movie agent allows you to configure a minimum threshold for those automatic collections (e.g. if you only want to see collections with at least 2 or 3 movies).

See: ⋮ > Manage Library > Edit... → Advanced in the library context menu for the related options.

You can add other movies in two ways:

  1. By assigning that collection as a Tag to the movie to be added (:pencil2: > Tags > Collections)
  2. By manually adding a movie using the Add to command from the movie’s context menu.

If you want to delete collections, this is best done from the Collections tab of that particular library. You can delete them one-by-one or multi-select a number of collections to delete them in one go.

See the related support article for more details

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Thanks for the info. I did get them batch deleted in the collections tab. What is the format for movies? Right now I just have them all in a folder. does each one need to be in its own folder with the name of the movie?

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Giving each movie it’s own folder will give you a better experience in the long run. While it’s technically supported to have the individual files all in the same folder, there’s a number of downsides – some of them are:

  • you cannot store local extras alongside your movies if they’re all in 1 folder
  • library scans will take longer as Plex will have to compare each file (instead of e.g. figuring that the entire movie folder hasn’t changed) – this can get much more time consuming with a growing library
  • it’ll be harder to find your content with a growing library.

Personally I think the main benefits of giving each movie its own top-level folder start to kick in when you start dealing with local media assets (posters, backgrounds, theme music…) and extras (deleted scenes, gag reels, interviews from your discs…). Though even if you’re not yet extensively using those, it’s good practice to organize your media to support this in the future (otherwise it’ll be a much bigger pain to re-organize things further down the road).

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