Would like to second (third? fourth? fifth?) the above request. I’m having this issue as well now. I just transferred my entire library to a new hard drive and am rebuilding my collections from scratch. I just started yesterday…and today half of the collections had items lost to the tags.
I’ve went through all the above suggestions above. None of them apply to me. This definitely seems to be a bug, and a major one at that.
The more I’ve paid attention to this, I’m finding that Plex simply isn’t consistently saving updates made to collection fields, genre fields, etc. in a locked state. In places where I’ve gone back in and set those fields as “locked”, I have no longer noticed those specific ones to lose the tags I’ve added. Could this simply be a bug with the lock functionality? According to what I’ve read, fields are supposed to automatically be set as locked when an edit is made. And while it appears as such upon initial save, there are instances where revisiting shows the lock to have been removed even though the tags are still in place (for now). Then the addition of another movie to the collection causes all unlocked metadata of all movies already in the collection to be refreshed, which in turn causes the unlocked fields to be reset.
So why is this routinely being ignored? it just happened to me again this morning - sometime overnight, 103 collection tags were randomly removed from my database. It’s getting ridiculous, especially considering this has clearly been an issue for months/years without being addressed by anyone.
I’m a software engineer and architect. I’m not saying that I’m better than anyone, and I’m not saying the Plex engineers are not talented, and that the software doesn’t offer really cool functionality, but you can tell that Plex is a little fragile/wonky in places, and I think tagging is definitely one of those places.
I have the same problem. My movie collection is 2,000+ physical media burned to (mainly) mkv, stored on unraided single volume NAS. Each movie along with folder / fanart / movie info (xml) stored in their own folders after several years using a now quite old Mede8er and WDTV before that. Swapped for a new NVidia Shield TV Pro which arrived yesterday, bought mainly for Plex. Set my usual TV apps up, then delved into having a go with Plex / PMS; logged into my Windows web app, trying to figure the best way to scan and organise my first library. Didn’t relish prospect of scanning my whole movie folder so thought I’d replicate from how media is stored on NAS - by genres, e.g. Action, Animation, Comedy, etc. So I click away - Movies > Manage Library > Edit > Add Folders > Browse . . I add the same collection name as the genre folder in my NAS and Plex begins scanning into the library. I have about 50 odd movies in Classic - Film Noir, another 50 or so in Classic - Hitchcock, etc. These are standard def and I’ll leave my BluRay / 4k stuff 'til later. I’m thinking it’ll be a nightmare if I carry on just adding to the list because I foresee it being difficult to categorise how I want everything later - i.e. after 2,000 movies. So I check marked the first ‘batch’ and tagged them all to new Collection (same name as per genre folder). Selected uncheck all. Same for the second batch. Two collections, in theory. Most I got to was 3 x collections. BUT - this was an exercise repeated constantly when for no apparent reason, suddenly I’d blink and then find no items in the previously created collection icon thingy (with the random(?) 4 x movie posters). After several hours and well past midnight I left it, defeated and extremely frustrated.
It has been 26 days with no response.
For me, the issue has slowed down (but not resolved in any way) in direct portion to how often I add movies to my collection and re-scanning the library. This leads to some credence to the proposed possibility above that maybe the Collection Tag is not “locking” as it should and as a result loses user customized Collection tags that users assigned to them when the library is re-scanned.
I have gotten to the point that I take screenshots of my collections so I might have some clue when I have been hit with losing random Collection tags again.
Like today I lost only 1 or 2 random Collection tags in 4 of my 30 collections …at least that I can tell. I added about 20 movies over the last 2 weeks so if my Action Collection gained 3 movies but then lost one random tag, I will still see an increase in its overall number so I don’t know I lost a collection tag with one movie (out of 498 movies) in that collection.
I really like Plex, but on top of the numerous unresolved threads over the last year or more time span …plus several more users currently reporting this ongoing same issue above… Plus I am still experiencing it after 3 months of faithfully following all naming conventions and trouble shooting steps…this issue remains.
After several users continually to report this challenge over the last 26 days with no responses, tends to lean towards there are not many more answers that can be shared that users can do on their own behalf to help eliminate this very frustration and ongoing issue.
HOW can we have this moved to a BUG STATUS so that developers will be able to take a closer look at the root cause and fix it?
Add me to the list of PlexPass Lifers who have been experiencing this frustrating bug. Everything happens for me exactly as others have described in this thread (my files all follow standard naming convention, auto-scanning is off, and empty trash after every scan is unchecked, and virtually all of my movies are in mvk format).
I just started using Collections within the past month or so after experiencing a similar random loss of custom settings in the Theme tag (which I had been using to sort movies). I decided to see if using Collections would be a work-around. Apparently not.
Being a developer myself, I don’t think researching this would be difficult… look for any code that assigns tag values, copies tag values, etc, basically any code that manipulates the tag info. I gotta think you’d be able to find something by looking at this. It’s possible if there are multiple threads processing that some thread safety checks are missing, and one thread is stepping on another thread, or a possible race condition. I’d also look at the database/repository code to see if there is a bug in there with a missing parameter, mismatched parameter or something like that. There’s a gremlin in there somewhere, and I wish I could just pop the hood and fix it myself.
It’s insane that this continues to be ignored. It’s at the point where I’m following this topic just to bump the post every few days in hopes someone within Plex will actually bother to read it.
I’d like to know if anyone else is seeing this pattern. What I’m seeing is that when I add/update tags for either genre or collection (which then shows as locked) and also change the poster as part of the same save, going back in finds the locks to have been removed. If I add/update tags but don’t touch the poster, the lock is still in place when I revisit it.
Yes, I believe that’s what’s happening to me as well, actually. I think you’re onto something there.
I knew that decoder ring would pay off. Haha. Hopefully this is at least a path to a work-around for the time-being. Sure would be nice if we could get a fix in place though.
Gave up on collections. Instead, I’ve created seperate libraries for all my film genres as per how they’re organised on the NAS. Should’ve done that from the off, I suppose. My music folder on NAS is huge and I’ll probably do the same for that, but in small test - as - I - go steps; I soon encountered a new issue where songs in the first couple of libraries I created suddenly aren’t playing (am not alone, me and others have highlighted this problem on other thread). I’m new to Plex taken in by much hype about how great it is and keen to get it all set up but am a bit frustrated with the apparent glitches.
I did that for YEARS - until finally, I admitted defeat, when it became apparent that Plex will NEVER allow Actor Search from their Cast Images across multiple libraries - so when you click on an actor - you’ll ONLY EVER SEE the items in that particular library.
I consolodated 23 Libraries into the Plex Standard “One Each” for Movies/Shows/Other - I still maintain 3 Music Libraries.
I didn’t realise that, so thanks for the heads up. I haven’t ever felt the need in the past to use the various search / links e.g. for actors to all their movies I might have; I’m rarely thinking ‘I must watch a Tom Hanks movie, where are they’, instead quite happy to sit back, think of what movie mood I’m (or my better half) in; do I want a laugh, or some escapism, maybe for a fright, whatever, and scroll through the corresponding genre. I am very new to Plex, and so just experimenting with so far just a few newly created libraries picking up features, any hints and tips, and these pesky glitches as I go.
Back to collections, I can see the benefit in them; I have, for example, all the British Carry On films which I’d like to embed within British Comedy, or my Bond collection into Action - Thrillers, or my Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) set into Classic - British Vintage.
Collections are how we are dealing with "31 Clicks to Drill For Westerns (for instance) on my Roku (for instance):
‘Technically’ - all my movies are in the same library - so Actor Search works fine now.
Give a user a feature - and he’ll find a way to abuse it…lol
I’ll persevere. I can see let’s say this area in my library. Am I able to hide the extraneous 3 x individual entries to the right of the ‘3 movies’ collection?
Update: Figured it out; Hover the mouse over the top left, click on the little circle that appears . . Edit . . Advanced > Collection Mode > Hide items in this collection
Going back to my original comments, I think i just started out wrong thinking I’d build a library from scratch as collections, rather than having collections within a library. Doh. Anyway, onwards and upwards . .
Ok, so I haven’t gone as far as sorting out my whole media collection yet. I initially gave up with ‘collections’ but that was probably because I didn’t quite get the ‘library’ concept. Then I started uploading all my movie collection but feared it would take forever, panicked and hit the abort button. Then I created - so far - just a handful of new libraries, one at a time, as per my movie genre folders. I take it I’m just being a bit scaredy cat and this isn’t the way to go.
My movies are stored into genre folders . . .
From what I’m learning, I merely have to have just the one Plex movie library where everything - metadata wise - is pulled into it - even if it takes - what, one or two or more hours? (I’m ok with this BTW). Then, I can have collections if I want (and I do) and my preference would be to marry up with the genre names I already have? Can I have sub collections within a collection - e.g. as per the highlighted folders Tarzan et al? I prefer minimal clutter, so again, if I could have the Bourne / Bond / Die Hard etc. franchises all as collections within my Action - Thriller collection that would suit me, if it’s doable.
Sorry if I’m being dim - just seeking clarification before I progress as clearly there’ll be a need for devoting a good chunk of time revisiting and editing minutiae e.g. renaming (such as those 4 x movies in the screen shot with no year appended - it’s only in the last year or so I started doing this to catch up with convention and ease of scraping), uploading some of my own obscure poster / artwork etc., so appreciate all the time and effort you guys have already put in and your hints, tips and advice.
Plex is designed to work with 1 (one) movie library. I battled the beast for years, gave up, and now have all my movies in one library. I still have many movie folders spattered across half a dozen HDDs, all aimed at the one movie library - or rather, the one movie library aimed at all the various folders.
The thing you DO want to do - is put all your movies in a folder named exactly like the movie with a proper name (movie and folder named exactly the same proper name). Yep, madness, but trust me - you want to do it.
The reason is simple: When a movie is in it’s own folder and has been scanned - it no longer requires scanning, unless something has changed within. This cuts way down on scan time when ‘most’ of your movie library doesn’t require scanning during maintenance or when manually triggered.
Big Job? Maybe, but worth it in the long run. I’ve been at it about 4 months - am now at perhaps 80% completion - and a scan flies when it used to crawl.
I did wonder about the best practice to have the same movie file name as per the folder it is housed in, so thank you for being informative. I have actually been doing this over the years when using Mede8er to scrape, but only in the last couple of years been getting into the habit of annotating the year, realising e.g. corresponding IMDB movie titles can differentiate better with remakes etc. I’ve also spent a chunk of time applying my own artwork and tweaking my own bespoke wallpaper templates using ThumbGen, also saved to each movie’s folder. I’m guessing all that artwork will now be mostly redundant but can stay there e.g. for using any that Plex doesn’t detect while scanning / trying to match.
I think I’ll revisit my media folders / files to get the remainder consistent - ‘moviename (yyyy).mkv’.
Prior to Mede8er (chipset / firmware won’t now cope with TVDB’s revamped web pages so adding artwork and xml files need to be done manually) I used WDTV (lots of problems throughout). I use File2Folder after I’ve finished burning sessions for any newly acquired DVD / BDs. I’ve noticed Plex populated one of my TV shows series incorrectly where I have the first (1963 - - ) Doctor Who on file but it gave me the rebooted season 1 (2005) instead.
As you can see, I’ve correctly edited the media but I’d seek a utility - if there is one - which will batch rename e.g. to annotate the correct year and preserving the remainder of the filename.
