Plex Web is 4.59.2
Synology Version 1.23.6.4881-6000
Which synology do you have? It might be specific to that. I’m testing on my Windows PMS and I can’t reproduce this.
It’s a DS918+
I have been having the same exact issues on windows 10 and have re created the collections 3 times. I am about to give up on them all together
I’m having the same issues on my Nvidia Shield (running both server and client). I added movies to my own collections via a web browser, selecting multiple files and using the “add to” feature. When I view a movie’s detail page from the collection tab and go back, it’s gone from the collection. The most annoying thing is that I’ve spent hours putting these collections together, and now they’re all but empty.
I’ve found that I’ve got exactly the same problem. All my “old” Collections, built by filling in the relevant field in the “Tags” menu of the Editing page of the chosen films, are perfect: no title has ever been missing.
Instead, movies added using one (and only one) of the “Add to Collection>” pop-up menus tend to mysteriously disappear.
I did a whole series of tests to be able to describe as precisely as possible what happens.
To replicate the problem it is important to follow exactly the following steps:
Click on the three vertical dots at the bottom right of a movie poster: a pop-up menu will appear;
Move the cursor to “Add to >”: a pop-up submenu will appear;
Choose one of the existing collections;
or
Select “Add to Collection…” and:
→ create a new Collection
or
→ choose from one of the existing Collections;
Open the Collection in which the film has been inserted;
*** Up to this point, the film is visible in the Collection; from the next point forward, suddenly and in front of your eyes, the film will disappear from the Collection. ***
Click on the small pen at the bottom left of the poster of the film just inserted (to open the editing page);
Click on the “Tags” menu and scroll down until you see the “Collections” field;
Note that the “Collections” field appears BLANK while it should contain the name of the Collection you are in;
*** If steps 5 to 7 are done quickly enough, you may notice that the “Collections” field is already empty BEFORE the movie disappears… in fact, that must be the reason why the disappearance occurs. ***
---------------------------------- >>> NB:
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The replicability of the problem is only possible THE FIRST TIME that it is applied to a film: if you want to replicate it again you will need to choose another film. (If you try to do the same thing again with the same film, at point 7a the “Collections” field will no longer be empty and the film will no longer disappear).
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The problem does NOT arise if at the time of adding it to a Collection the film is already present in other collections (ie if the “Collections” field of the “Tags” page of the editing window is not empty);
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The problem does NOT arise if the film is added to the Collection through the menus that appear by clicking on the three horizontal dots present inside the film card or by entering the name of the Collection in the relative field of the Editing page of the film…
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If the above conditions are met, even just clicking on the poster (opening the film card) will be enough to make the film disappear from the Collection.
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The problem occurs ALSO if the film is added to several Collections at the same time: the “Collections” field will be empty and the film will disappear from all of them at the same time.
I hope it will be helpful in solving the problem.
PS: My PMS is installed on a MacBook Pro (MacOS Big Sur 11.5.2) and the films stored on two simple external hard drives.
PS2: Sorry for my poor english. 
Just adding my name to the people impacted by this bug.
I’ve setup collections twice now and both times I come back to find all my collections empty. What’s worse is that I’m unable to put my movies back into their collections (I just get a “There was a problem updating this item” popup in the UI and no additional logs even after enabling debugging). From the first to second time, I ended up deleting the collections and making new ones… Same result though, empty collections now and I’m not doing it again a third time.
Plex running on Windows 10 with a local hard drive.
Version 4.62.1
So I may have stumbled on something shortly after posting the above AND might be able to explain why @anon18523487 didn’t see an issue…
Some but not all of my libraries have been in place for years and after posting, clicking around, and reading some other problems here in the forums, I discovered the “Upgrade Library” feature that’s not getting the best of reviews. I bit the bullet and upgraded one of my old libraries, recreated a collection that I deleted because it wasn’t working, added movies, and they’re still there after clicking around and refreshing a few times…
Then I rebooted and the collection is still there with the movies I added. Could this issue be stemming from old libraries that were created prior to whatever magic happens under the covers with the “new” libraries? In other words, are collections not compatible with old libraries???
What agent were you using? I’ve tried with the Plex Movie agent (new and legacy) and I could not reproduce this issue?
I think you’re right. I created a new Library just to try and in fact I can no longer replicate that anomalous behavior and the disappearance of the films from the Collections. Obviously, this does not solve the problem: the procedure MUST work with old Libraries, too.
I didn’t understand if you are asking me but, just in case, I use Plex Movie (Legacy) Agent… and Plex Movie Scanner.
PS: as reported by bfloeagle, the problem practically affects only the “old” libraries. I created a new one to test and actually I can no longer replicate the problem (while in the old one the problem persists!).
I want to underline that having more than 8200 films and that EVERY one of them has been checked/edited/modified by me (posters, alphabetical order, matches, Collections, and so on), I don’t want to perform any upgrade that risks to destroy all the work I’ve done… so I really hope we can find this bug and fix it.
Ok! I just “discovered” one more detail. I performed a “Refresh all metadata” on my old library and for a few minutes it seemed that the problem was “solved” (so to speak) and everything worked perfectly: trying to do the same tests I explained above, the films no longer seemed to disappear from their Collections. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long: after a while the problem returned exactly as before.
Furthermore, I also noticed that, contrary to what I had said before, ALSO film added to Collections through the menus that appear by clicking on the three horizontal dots inside the film card were starting to disappear.
Another thing: maybe that’s obvious, but performing a “Refresh metadata” on individual films contained in one or more Collections causes the film to disappear from EVERY Collection IF the relative “Collections” field in the “Tags” menu on the Edit page isn’t locked (padlock OFF) . Basically, the Refresh deletes also the content of the “Collections” field (why? what sense does it make?) and therefore the film disappears from ALL the Collections in which it was previously present. If, on the other hand, the aforementioned padlock is locked, the Refresh does not create any problems.
In summary, I believe that a solution to all this could be that, when you add a movie to a Collection through the famous vertical-or-horizontal-three-dots-menus etc., the software takes care of automatically locking the relative padlock, exactly as it happens when you manually insert the Collection name from the Editing page.
I apologize for the length and, again, for my english… but I still hope to help.
@anon18523487 I was using the same as @fix. Plex Movie (Legacy) Agent and Plex Movie Scanner but now it is Plex Movie for both after the upgrade.
Just adding to this since I just experienced this.
Collections and items created changing the “tag” attribute work fine.
Items added using the “Add to…” menu keep disappearing from collections at random times. Sometimes moving between the collection and the movie, sometime just opening the movie page.
I wont use the “Add to…” again, it’s not reliable in this state.
I have been having the same problem with four of my collections. I have created many collections manually through both the “Add to” drop-down menu option and by manually editing the collection tags for individual films. I believe that all four collections that are having the issue had their name changed after adding some of the films to them, and that all the films that are disappearing were added with “Add to” drop-down menu (changed “Fast and Furious” to “Fast & Furious”, changed “XXX” to “xXx”, changed “Ong-Bak” to “Ong Bak”, and changed “Pixar films” to “Pixar”). Some of the films remain in the collections, but most are deleted, including if I delete the collections and recreate them with different names. I have just noticed that the films that are not deleted from the collections have the collections tag padlocked, including after the collections are deleted (so the collection tag is then empty but padlocked). When I recreate the collections and edit the collection tags individually and make them padlocked, then the recreated collections seem to work accurately, at least for now.
Just started seeing this annoyance after years of no issues with collections in general. I do not use the ‘add to’ context menu, just editing item tags to create and manage collections as I always have.
ATM I can literally sit in a collection of 26 films and watch them vanish from that collection one by one just by starting a library scan - all tags a sort info has been wiped.
W.T.F.
If I go to edit a listing in a collection, even while the edit pane is still open, the tag vanishes and it gets kicked out of that collection, then I have to rescan that library to have it show up, edit, re-add the tag, then it goes back where it belongs. Problem is the scan then takes out more items from that collection.
yeah collections are ropey af, makes you really not want to bother sometimes you will create massive ones (think Horror or Stephen King, James Bond etc) and then yeah they just empty by themselves - after the big library upgrade thing all mine were just gone. it’s depressing to put all that effort in and see it go to waste.
So far I cannot reproduce such “disappearances” on my system (lucky me).
The two scenarios I can think of that might be causing this are
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automatic/periodic library scans in combination with automatic emptying the trash after scans and some hiccup/glitch with the storage not responding during a scan (e.g. because it takes too long to spin up or is temporarily disconnected). Plex should handle completely disconnected drives better but I’ve seen examples where there’s still been issues w/ files no longer being found and Plex therefore removing them. Files will usually be recognized during another automatic/periodic scan and re-added to the library – though without your manual edits.
You can rule this out quite easily by disablingSettings>[Server Name]>Library>Empty trash automatically after every scan. This way, Plex will maintain the library item even if the file is perceived to be gone.
As a long-term mitigation you could look into why those drives aren’t available (or take too long to spin-up). -
In case you configured your library to automatically create collections (
⋮>Manage Library>Edit...→Advanced>Minimum automatic collection sizeset to anything butDisabled) every metadata refresh will update the collections based on recent updates to The Movie Database. There’s the occasional “vandalism” where users “fix” movie/collection associations in a way that breaks it for most users (weird mappings etc.). Those are usually fixed quickly by the mods/users on The Movie Database… but it can happen that Plex had already picked the changes up and the fix takes a moment to tickle down.
@Caveat: your issue with sort information being gone too implies that your issue might be #1
If that’s not the case and you anyway see tags “disappearing while watching”, please share your server logs for somebody from Plex to review. Thanks!!
I’ve disabled the empty trash, we’ll see what happens
though it would be odd as I was actively on the system and the drive /file system was fine with no system errors while PLEX was having its issues.
Would be nice if PLEX had its own tool to review /export specific ranges rather than the whole bundle.
never configured auto-collections. TBH, did not know it was even an option until you brought it up, but not something I’d be likely to use in any case.
