The most common issue is with naming – especially if the library hierarchy is off.
Naming that’s off or allows for a bad match can result in Plex accidentally merging a file as a different-quality version of a different movie. To check for that, filter your library for Duplicates and check out any found items (e.g. > Info will show the list of files associated with an item).
Alternatively you can switch the library to be displayed by Folders and navigate to the folder of a missing item. If there’s a completely different movie showing in the folder, it might be a bad match.
For those cases you can select the Split Apart option in the context menu of an item and subsequently perform Fix Match on the incorrectly matched one.
It can be trickier to find items that have been identified as “stacked files” (1 movie split across multiple files). It can be an option to sort your library by Duration to find “overly long” items (Plex will add the individual play times of stacked files). This can work if you don’t have any other super-long running items.
This can e.g. happen if you’re using similar file names for items belonging to a franchise or collection, e.g.
Movies
The Lord of the Rings-pt1.ext
The Lord of the Rings-pt2.ext
The Lord of the Rings-pt3.ext
instead of scanning/matching those as 3 items, Plex could end up listing them as 3 consecutive parts of a single item.
Thank you for that. I understood from Otto that I should remove the beginning of the pathway (volume 1) in the Add File interface. That would have removed all the files I wanted to keep, at the same time. it’s difficult to know what people mean sometimes.
a lot of my films are in “collections” by Director; I have a photo of each director in the “collections” tab.
Some f the directors’ photos have appeared in the “Library” tab. If I delete the photo, I think I will disassociate all the films associated with that director.
one reason I’m not finding my movies in plex is that it keeps renaming my foreign-named films to English versions. It also changes the poster to the English version - this is SO annoying! im having to rename stuff into the original language; - is there any way to “FIX” names and posters please?
There are better ways to organize your movies. To separate them into folders by director is probably throwing a spanner in the works. To resolve that properly, you’d have to add all those “director folders” individually ot your plex library.
Which is 1) tedious, and 2) will only work for about 2 or 3 dozen directors.
The director of a movie is part of the metadata, which get applied automatically if the movie is correctly identified and “matched”.
To then go and create a few (smart) collections in Plex for your favorite directors is probably the better way, than to put up with the restrictions of a rigid “director” folder structure.
The folder structure serves only 1 goal: to make it easiest for Plex to safely identify your movie – in order to fetch the right set of metadata for it.
You can instruct Plex to use the “original titles”. But consequentially, that means that you will get e.g. Chinese script for a Chinese movie title.
The language of the rest of the metadata is determined by the language setting of the Plex library.
It can be overridden on a by-movie basis. Simply edit the movie in Plex.
P.S. your example above of a library for International Winners and Nominees is a prime example for when to use a collection within your regular library, rather than a separate library. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201273953-collections/
I never quite understand if I’ve explained myself properly. I haven’t separated films into folders. There are no “director” folders anywhere.
I have just added certain films to a “collection” under the collection tab, where I enter the name of a director. They appear there as a picture of 3 or 4 films. I have just replaced that picture with a photo of the matching director.
If you have it set to “Hide items which are in collections”, when you browse your library you will see the collections, but not the individual items.
By the way, if you didn’t already do it like this - you can make a smart collection for a director by filtering movies by director and then saving the result as a smart collection - that way you won’t need to manually add new movies to it.
Hi and THANKS! Yes I use that feature all the time to hide collections I.e. the director’s photo from the LIBRARY TAB. To no avail this time - they kept reappearing and I realised my bungling had disassociated them from their films. I have painstakingly added them all back and now the feature works again.
I’ve never ventured to understand how smart collections work but your suggestion is fascinating and would be really useful for me. Can you point towards a link showing how to do this please.
This is really interesting. Does that mean that within my “movies” (movies in the English language) folder I can add a folder called “bafta and Oscar winners and nominees”?
If so, how do I add movies to it? Would I have to move the films to the same named directory in finder?
This is two independent topics that have nothing to do with each other.
You can manually or automatically create regular collections inside Plex; similarly you can manually define smart collections based on an advanced filter.
You can add multiple (not-overlapping) top-level library folders to a single library… scanning the library will pick up files from all those folders and match them… this can be useful if your libraries are spread across different drives or if you separate movies in separate main sections in your file system (e.g. English/French/Polish movies…)
Adding files to a separate library folder won’t create a new collection. Collections are not matching anything in your file system.
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