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+--- Thread: Guidance on adding people (actors) to media? (/t-guidance-on-adding-people-actors-to-media)
Guidance on adding people (actors) to media? - MagicalWatermellon - 2025-01-03
I'm in the process of tidying up some media and noticing annoying behaviour when people are added to media objects.
I do not think this qualifies as a bug, more of a "it works but it's super annoying sometimes" situation, so looking either for tips on working around this more efficiently, or hopefully someone can modify something in a future release that makes this easier to deal with.
The problem: When adding people to media, both manually and via matching the item through a metadata source, if that person's name is somewhat close to another name (I have no idea what determines priority here), they will match to that person, get renamed into that person, which causes the removal of the originally created person from the media object they were created on.
steps to reproduce:
- open up a media item like movie/show
- edit metedata manually to add a person, or the "identify" function did it for you
- the person added to the media has a name that for some reason matches to a different person (my theory is "more popular" such that they appear in IMDB?)
- you open the URL to that person, which the first time loading their page causes it to match to an online metadata source
- the matching came up with the wrong person as mentioned in point 3
- as a result of this incorrect match, the person's "Name" field is modified, you also notice the media object you created them on is gone from their page.
- as a result of point 6, the person no longer appears on the media object from point 1 once you refresh the media object's page - this is very annoying if you don't still have the person's page open because now it's harder to return to it unless you had it open in a new tab or your browser history can get it back. re-adding the person with their proper, original name on the media object results in nothing happening.
- Unless you have access to the "bugged" person's page to edit their name back to the correct one you're now stuck.
Workaround:
Starting at step 4 above:
- whenever adding a person manually, make sure to keep their person page open, edit their name back to the correct one if it changed. You notice it worked because the list of media they appear in suddenly shows the media object you originally created them on.
- "lock" the metadata for this person when editing their meatadata, so this can't happen again
The workaround "works" but is rather tedious (takes about twice as long to add a person), and if you forget about it can cause an annoying situation.
This happens constantly when working with asian actors whose names may have multiple spellings that might match to other actors, or if using their asian alphabet names.
This also happens quite a lot with adult/nsfw actors whose stage names might come close to mainstream actors, example: Jane Wilde matches to (for whatever reason) Olivia Wilde.
Is there some option somewhere to make it so people always have their name field locked upon creation? This would likely make the issue go away for me.
RE: Guidance on adding people (actors) to media? - TheDreadPirate - 2025-01-03
I believe this is a known issue. I can't find the ticket I'm thinking of.