Plex added a movie to library with incorrect "date added". How to change it?

General Discussions
1

Hello,
So recently I have set up completely new plex server at my home, added my new movie library and… something weird happened. I am always sorting my movies by “date added”. Even though I have just started this plex server and just added completely new library Plex thinks, that I have added some movies 10 (!) years ago. Some of them are added 4 years ago, some year ago and some of them are added with correct date (1 day ago).

Is there any way how to fix it or set the “date added” manually? Thanks in advance.

2

If you add media in the course of creating a Plex library Plex will use the file’s date as ‘Added at’.
But it will do this only this first time.
If you think about it, this is more useful than having all of your library’s item added at the same day.

3

It’s all fine, but then it makes a mistake. None of my movies or even this partition was created “10 years ago” like Plex thinks. So it’s clearly not working as intented and in fact… I would rather have it added all in the library on the same day.

4

Perform the Plex Dance with all but one movies then.

5

It seems to me like the “By Date Added” grouping really means “By Date Added To Library” – so when I move media around among libraries, or consolidate libraries, the effected media is re-dated and pops to the beginning (or end) of the list. I think there should be a (new?) grouping like “By Date Added To Server” (by whatever grouping name you wish to call it). In that way, any media added – say, a year ago – will still properly appear in its orderly sequence no matter when/if you move it around.

This may even do away with the need for the Plex Dance, which works OK, but becomes rather onerous with libraries of significant size.

6

I’m having a similar problem. The first hundred or so movies in my main library all have a Date Added date that is in 2039, twenty years in the future. How do I change this? It makes the Recently Added frame on my home page meaningless and makes finding new additions to the library a needlessly onerous chore.

1 Like
7

Only by directly editing the database.
Only do that if you have done some SQL before. And make a backup copy of your database file first!

The alternative is to perform the Plex Dance with the affected items, which will make them ‘added at’ recently.

8

I will try the ‘Dance.’ I have no experience with SQL. Thank you.

9

Follow up: I cannot do the Dance, as the Linux permissions on the affected external drives do not allow me to create, edit or move files. This is one reason I am moving away from Ubuntu to a Hackintosh server. I am hoping that once I can get OSX running on this machine, a lot of these problems that arose with the migration to Ubuntu will go away - to be followed, I have no doubt, by a host of new problems, but at least I have familiarity with macOS and know what to do when things fall apart. Thank you again for the advice.