Question about renaming media paths while still retaining watched status

General Discussions
1

I want to clean up my media folder a bit to have a consistent naming scheme. Currently, it looks somethying like this:

Movie.1.2016.releasegroup.x264
Movie 2 (2016)
Movie-3-2017-x264
etc.

I want to clean this up so that all the same naming convention “Movie (Year)” . Im worred about losing watched status history though. Is Plex smart enough to identify the media as the same one, thus keeping watched status once I re-scan? or will it treat it as a new movie once the path changes? FWIW, I’m not renaming the movie, just the folder.

Thanks!

2

‘watched’ status is not attached to the file name in Plex, but to the guid of the item.
And this guid is constant, if the movie is matched with the same metadata agent as before.

Which means: if you have always used ‘Plex Movie’ as your default agent for movies, there is no problem.
There might be some issues if you have switched your default agent at some time in the past.

But there is also another mechanism in place in Plex, which hopefully prevents the loss of ‘watched’ status. It should catch the media file’s ‘hashes’ and so will recognize the file, even if its filename was changed.

Tip: you might want to save your primary Plex database file before you start your renaming operation

You should also disable the ‘automatic’ and the ‘periodic’ library update options as long as you work on your file and folder names.
(Settings - Server - Library)

And please disable this option as well (same place as above):
‘Empty trash automatically after every scan’

Another tip: Filebot

3

@OttoKerner said:
‘watched’ status is not attached to the file name in Plex, but to the guid of the item.
And this guid is contant, if the movie is matched with the same metadata agent as before.

Which means: if you have always used ‘Plex Movie’ as your default agent fo movies, there is no problem.
There might be some issues if you have switched your default agent at some time in the past.

But there is also another mechanism in place in Plex, which hopefully prevents the loss of ‘watched’ status. It should catch the media file’s ‘hashes’ and so will recognize the file, even if its filename was changed.

Tip: you might want to save your primary Plex database file before you start your renaming operation

You should also disable the ‘automatic’ and the ‘periodic’ library update options as long as you work on your file and folder names.
(Settings - Server - Library)

And please disable this option as well (same place as above):
‘Empty trash automatically after every scan’

Another tip: Filebot

Thanks!