Collections randomly lost movies but display art still shows them

[zellonatious 3]

A lot of my collections have randomly lost a lot of movies that were in them. The number of movies lost varies from collection to collection. The artwork for the collection still shows them but they're no longer in the collection. The movies themselves still exist on the emby server. Not sure when it occurred. I recently updated to 4.9.3.0 a month or two ago.

Is there any way to recover the collection state?

 

embyserver.txt

[Luke 42314]

Hi, I think first we need to learn what happened. Do your movie files have nfo files next to them? Can you get it to happen again with something new?

[zellonatious 3]

They don't have NFOs no. I will look into reproducing it but it was quite unexpected. I was hoping this was a known issue.

[Luke 42314]

Have you renamed movie files or reorganized folders?

[zellonatious 3]

On 4/9/2026 at 1:44 AM, Luke said:

Have you renamed movie files or reorganized folders?

No

[Luke 42314]

OK this is odd. Are you able to get it to happen again with a new movie?

Were these automatic collections or did you create them manually?

[zellonatious 3]

On 4/14/2026 at 4:26 AM, Luke said:

OK this is odd. Are you able to get it to happen again with a new movie?

Were these automatic collections or did you create them manually?

They're manual collections.

I did some further investigation. I have the playback reporting plugin installed and I looked at the movies that were affected (i.e. removed from a collection) and compared it to those that weren't. It seems that the movies that got removed had their ID changed. When I click on a movie through this plugin (which takes you to the movie page in emby directly, emby shows an error "The requested item could not be found. It may have been recently removed from the server."

However movies that weren't affected work fine and just go to that movie (i.e. the movie item ID has not changed).

However if I search for the affected movie and check the stats, it says e.g. "Added 06/01/2021" so I'm not sure. I have emby server installed on a synology box and recently added a drive so I'm not sure if maybe it temporarily moved the file or became temporarily unavailable to emby? I would have though the "Added" item in emby would change though. 

Is there a way to keep item IDs persistent?

Edited 16 hours ago by zellonatious

[visproduction 338]

Lots of combinations to test?

1. Moving or renaming content: If you move a media folder, using any file management or command lines, all collection, tags and sometimes even extra descriptions details can be lost.  You could take a screen shot of the media page details, move the media and then redo the collections, tags and other details of the content from the screenshot.  Or just avoid moving or renaming media.  This is obviously not user friendly and worth discussing as a new feature.
2. Multiple audio:  Rare situation with multiple audios might cause strange behavior and loose the ability for playback with some software.  I am guessing each combination and TV brand handles this differently.  If the first choice audio doesn't play, some setups just give up and perhaps Emby sends it to transcode.  The exact same media with other setups, jumps to the next audio track. Each media with .mkv container can have default audio settings for multiple audio tracks and Emby can have it's own rules for preferred language.  Some players can do audio track 1 and some cannot.  Does this work with every possible default media or Emby setting for each video codec on all resolutions on each TV brand and with every Emby software? 4 variables with 2 options result in 64 combinations to test for each playback setup.  Has this been well tested?
3. Adding extra content to media in the same directory with a filename that is different before the dash:   Fame (1980) - 720P,  Fame (1980) Street dance - 720P.  This might wipe out collection data.  I think the preferred way is to add an Extras subfolder. What happens if you just throw the videos in the same directory?   Has someone tested it?

Edited 1 hour ago by visproduction