There has been a much discussed bug in Plex that if you have a library that contains both personal media and movies, Plex will overwrite any changes you have made to the “Title” (even if the field “lock” is set) for media that it was unable to match. In other words, it does not respect the field “lock”, and it continually changes the title BACK to the filename any time that the library is re-scanned. This defies logic to me (what is the purpose of even having the field lock), but I eventually found a work-around. I could manually match the video, and select “Personal Media” from “Auto Match” pull down menu. I could then rename the “Title” and it would “stick”, even after a re-scan.
However, with the latest version of Plex (1.22.0.4163), I no longer have the option to select “Personal Media” from the Auto Match dropdown, I only have the “Plex Movie” option available. This is a huge problem for me since I have several libraries that contain “matchable” and “unmatchable” content. I used to waste a lot of time renaming titles after a rescan, but I was satisfied with the work-around that I eventually found. Now even that work-around does not work.
As mentioned above, this happens on content that has not been matched. Therefore, the “Unmatch” option is not available. Any video that does not have a match gets the Title overwritten by Plex, even though the field is locked. Interestingly, the “Sort Title” field does NOT get overwritten, nor does the summary, the date, etc. ONLY the Title field gets overwritten, and it is ALWAYS overwritten by the video FILENAME. There have been many discussions about this. I finally found online the work-around mentioned. I could manually match, select Personal Media, then change the Title. This work-around can no longer be used because the latest Plex version removed the Personal Media option from the Auto Match drop down.
Okay so I have found a bug where we’ll overwrite the title on unmatched items and submitted a fix.
The question this does bring up that interests me however is why you have unmatched items in a movie library. Is it that we aren’t matching the files correctly or are you just putting files inside the library which aren’t movies?
For the latter you should really consider having a separate library for those, things that aren’t movies should go into a “Other Videos” type library. That way we won’t try to match them every time you add new things to this library.
Thanks for submitting a bug fix. Hopefully it will be given some priority as this issue has been around for many years. I found the work-around that I had been using on an old Reddit post. Happy to send links if you want me to…
Regarding your question about why there are unmatched items in some of my libraries. As an example, I have a library for documentaries and another one for televised concerts. Plex does a decent job of identifying these items and adding the appropriate metadata. Maybe something like 50%??? I don’t know in advance whether Plex is going to identify them, so I just throw them in their respective libraries and let Plex do its thing. For those things it can’t handle, I take care of manually. This system works pretty well for my purposes, except for the annoying behavior that Plex overwrites the Title with the filename if it is unmatched even if the field is locked. As the issue has been around for so long, I gave up hope that there would be a fix anytime soon, thus I looked for, and found, the work-around mentioned.
i did mentioned about this quite old bug with “unmatched” personal media:
where the only solution to keep the manually added metadata was to match the file with “personal media”. This would not erase over and over the metadata (in particular the Title and the Release Date, both gets reset even if locked).
I recently updated to 1.22.0.4163, not sure if this is the one that contains already the fix, but in case, it isn’t working and “newly added” personal media metadata keeps being reset (previously added media and previously matched as personal media, is not losing them).
PS. basically same scenario/use of @gcan , I’ve got some movie type folders with Concerts and Documentaries.
Using the type movie for the collection it make it easy to match those concerts with the IMDB and others, but for concerts that didn’t had releases i am adding the info manually to those.
Same applies for some documentaries without a real release or match via the agents.
Nice! I just tried it out with a couple of “personal media” unmatched files, and the metadata is not changing (for now)
Thank you! this solved both issues
