Refresh Date Added to files' date created

Feature Suggestions
1

Over my years using Plex, I’ve had to rebuild my libraries more than once. Each time I have to re-install Plex or rebuild those libraries, Plex records the “Date Added” for all the files in the affected libraries as being the date that the files were added to the library–sensibly enough–as being the date that I’d had to reinstall Plex and recreate the library or whenever I’ve had to rebuild the libraries.

Hence, I might have a hundred or even many thousands of files (depending on the library), who all have the same date added, rendering that attribute useless to me as a way to differentiate or sort files for viewing or browsing.

Most of the time, however, I’m just having Plex read from directories of files that are already there on my hard drives, and it would be much more useful to assign “date added” to match the date modified or date created of each file as recorded by Windows (most of the time, those attributes are the same–though maybe date created is the more in-spirit most accurate one of the two–isolated from change if I rename the file for instance).

Most recently, for no reason that I am aware of, some of my libraries seem to have refreshed themselves somehow such that Plex thinks that all my files were added 8 days ago. This is a library that is set up as an “Other Videos” type library. Another library that reads those same directories, set up as a “Movies” type library, seems to accurately reflect that age of all those files (meaning the “date created” attribute of the files in the Windows file system/Drobo NAS).

I would like to request a feature within Plex that would allow us to tell Plex to refresh the “date added” attribute of all the files in a given library with the either the “date created” or “date modified” attribute of the file in the file system–maybe offering created vs modified as a choice in the feature.

2

Plex is doing exactly that, IF you add the folders during the creation of the library.
Afterwards, it is using just the current date.

So if you have to reinstall your server, make sure to add the libraries manually and include all folders and media locations right from the beginning.

Or even better, save a backup copy of the primary Plex database file and transfer it into the new installation. https://support.plex.tv/articles/202485658-restore-a-database-backed-up-via-scheduled-tasks/

3

Hm, are saying that if I delete the libraries today and recreate them today, March 22, 2020, Plex will then read in the movies and videos’ Windows file creation dates as the Plex “Date Added” date rather than use 3/22/2020 as the date added for each and every video in that library?

I ask, because that latter seems more in line with what I have seen Plex do in the past, when I have had to reinstall Plex in the past or recreate libraries in the past.

I’ll see if I can test this by just creating parallel libraries with those directories/files.

4

Hey!

So, with my newly created library, it appears to have worked…at least mostly. There seems to be some weirdness going on, but that might be some small fraction of the files. That fraction of the files all seem to be files that Plex thinks it has identified as a movie match and downloaded info to fill out or correct information about the movie.

And that seems to have set the “date added” to maybe the date of getting that information–for instance, a file with a file created date of 11/5/2014, now has a Date Added in Plex of 16 hours ago in this newly created library.

This was a library created from a single directory (and its many many subdirectories).

For my other library, which has been reset somehow with everything now showing as having been added roughly 23 days ago (and is created from the same directory as that new library), there are a couple of things that occur to me as perhaps having led that weird resetting:

  1. I run that PMS on a Windows computer and all the media lives on directories that are stored on a Drobo N2 (so, a NAS connected to the router), Those directories are mapped via Drobo’s Drobo Dashboard “Sharing” function to that Windows computer. Occasionally, that sharing function seems to fail, and those directories become unavailable, and Plex notices that. When I notice, I’ll restart that sharing, sometimes needing to restart the computer. Is it possible that, then, when PMS comes back and sees that those directories are there again, it treats the media as having been added to the library and, on scanning them, updates their “date added” date to that new scan date rather than retaining the previous “date added” date which hopefully was the Windows file creation date?
  1. I had two libraries that use the same directory–because I wasn’t sure which video type (“movies” vs “other videos”) would result in better “matches” for that content–which is not Hollywood movies, but other videos, including pr0n. This new, test library constitutes a third library pointing to that same directory (on the Drobo N2). Could it be problematic for the PMS to have more than one library using that one directory, such that any of the libraries could freak out and rescan/re-add everything, updating that Date Added date to whenever the rescanning happened?

…all that said, whatever the cause, one fix is the requested feature:

Some way to tell Plex to refresh all the “date added” dates for all the videos in a given library, setting that date to the file creation dates of those files.

This seems better than having to delete and re-create libraries whenever this happens. At least, it seems to me, it would mean that my collections, tags, genres, playlists would not then lose all the content from those deleted libraries and then also need to have all the titles re-added from the newly recreated library.

Also, at this point, 23 days after whatever re-scanning happened, my backups don’t go back far enough for me to restore to a state before the problem showed up.

5

Settings - Server - library - “Empty trash automatically after every scan”

Don’t activate it, unless your media are stored inside your server machine.

6

I know this is an old request, but I just wanted to add my vote and voice to this request.

The problem with the current method is, if you have a very large library and for some reason the initial import is interrupted, there is no way to continue importing, using the file creation date.

I’m currently in this exact situation. While rebuilding my server, I have a TV library that partially completed, and then I had to restart Plex due to another issue. When I restarted the scan, everything scanned from that point is giving me the current date as the Added date.

It would be fantastic to either tell Plex (through a preference) that you want to use the file creation date as the import date, or have an option to adopt the file creation date after the fact.

7

A lot of my “Date Added” tags are wrong because I had to reload the media files from backup. This caused the Date Added to be the date of the reload instead of the date of the file. This caused hundreds of movies to show they were all added at the same time.

Could an option be added to reset the Date Added tag to be the file create or file modified date?

8

Been there done that a hundred times… try that with reloading 80TB of movies/shows lol… I find that the date added isn’t useful except to show me if something I’ve added hasn’t been picked up by the plex scanner yet and I need to kick off a manual scan. You may also run into an issue if you re-load files that were copied to/from another folder as those will also all have the same date from the OS…