Plex Movie Title Search

General Discussions
1

When I add movies to my Plex server, the titles use “_” underscores vice spaces. Ie: A_Dogs_Purpose. When this occurs, I am not able to search for “dogs” or “purpose” and find the desired movie. Is there something I’m missing or a setting which would allow for this type of searching (contains)?
Server Version: Version 1.24.3.5033.

Thanks

2

So you should use spaces in place of underscores. No modern operating system has any problem with spaces in the file names.

In general, with the exception for the actual name of the movie, there is no reason for punctuation inside of file names except for the period between the “name” and the “extension.”

But I thought Plex used the movie name not the filename for matching in a search. so, if the movie is matched in Plex and metadata is retrieved then searches like you mention should work fine but the actual name of the movie you mentioned is “A Dog’s Purpose” and I am not sure if “dog” or “dogs” match “dog’s.”

Name things as Plex wants and Plex usage becomes MUCH easier. It is best not to fight the great Plexasaurus.

3

Thanks for the feed back. When I burn the file, the spaces are replaced with underscores in the metadata of the file. When plex scans the file, it pulls the properties and uses that for the title in Plex. It would seem that the search would use a wild card function of some sort (ie dog) which would allow for the current naming scheme to be used and the user could find the desired movie.

4

The easiest way to FIND the file is probably to sort your library by “date added”.
As for searching… I think the search improvements from earlier this year rely on searching full words… this could explain why you’re having issues with that kind of automatically created gibberish terms :wink: – if you don’t want Plex to use those you could e.g. update your library configuration not to prefer embedded metadata.

5

Thanks Tom80H. Where would that setting be to ignore metadata? I have a few thousand movies that I have collected over the years and not looking forward to manually changing each title so a movie can be found on key words. The developers have done a fantastic job with this and looking forward to see what else they come up with.

6
  1. hover your mouse over the library entry in the sidebar – alternatively go to Settings > [Server Name] > Manage > Libraries and hover over the respective library
  2. click ⋮ > Manage Library > Edit...
  3. open the Advanced tab
  4. disable/uncheck Prefer local metadata

The name of the option in step #4 might slightly vary if you’re using an older agent.
After updating the library you might need to refresh the library’s metadata (⋮ > Manage Library > Refresh All Metadata)

9

Thanks guys for your time. As I was walking though my settings, I noticed that the scan agent was sent to “plex Movie (Legacy)”. After I changed this to “Plex Movie”, I had the option to deselect " prefer local metadata". I’m glad to see that this was the trick. Now, I can go back and refresh my movie metadata and fix the names. Thanks again for everyone’s assistance. This has been bugging me for months and glad to see its finally resolved.