My problems with metadata just seem to be getting worse and worse. The latest problem I have noticed is a ton of movies no longer recognised. Based on googling and it’s ai it would seem that TMDB has changed the movie title year or how they determine it. Problem is - that’s a new development so total disruption all over my library once again. So everything that no longer matches has simply become unattached from its metadata. The original year in the file name, and 100% the same year on IMDB is no longer recognised in Infuse! Man, can’t we have a situation where we can lock the metadata- this whole thing of suddenly all posters and artwork disappearing is getting old and tiresome very fast now.
Infuse use tmdb as data source,so imdb maybe is not adapt infuse
Yes, I am aware of that. And I am also aware that until a month or so ago, every title in my collection was properly metadata indexed and linked.
Now its a complete mess. TMDB decided they would make the year based on some other metric and now every file that has a year they “disagree” with is no longer recognized by infuse (the year being the single most important property in the recognition of the metadata after the filename)- and now that change numbers in the thousands for me. Nice one, both of you, thanks!
The fact that infuse is happy to completely disrupt thousands of files based on “invisible” changes or ideas on TMDB is part of the same problem. It just keeps re-deciding everything should be changed on whatever whim seems to apply. So also infuse is so smart it says - ah, same name, year different by 1 year, definitely NOT the same movie, next…
Now the only option is to go and create over 12000 nfo and jpg files for all the files I have. Not gonna happen. I’ll go back to plex first.
If we were able to lock the library that would be great, but to see hours and hours and hours of work undone in an instant is soul destroying. So TMB has decided all the movie files on the entire internet are wrong, and infuse says “sweet, I’ll just go back now and mark the vast majority of the files in this dude’s library as unknown.”
Same thing’s been happening with the blank posters. No warning, just open it one day and most posters no longer have a title. “Oh, that’s TMDB, not us!”
No warning, no notice, no choice - this is the Infuse/TMDB way.
It looks like the fix for this is in the next Infuse 8.4.6 update that is releasing soon so maybe that will help with your other issues too.
I doubt that… Yes, the missing titles are fixed (probably), the multitude of movies that suddenly had a change of year and thus messed up libraries is not! Same thing happened here when the latest Apple TV OS update killed Infuse… Suddenly I had 200 files in Others, grrr
There is a set of improvements for handling of handling of artwork languages coming in the 8.4.6 update which should be out this week.
If you are seeing issues with actual matching (IE Infuse is not getting the correct matches at all) that may have a different cause.
Infuse will use the primary release year as listed on TMDB, and generally this is pretty accurate as it helps avoid collisions with remakes and random release dates of a special Blu-ray edition in Zimbabwe 30 years after the original release. If you have a year included in the filename that differs from what TMDB has listed this may lead to issues. In this case, you can look at adjusting the year in your filename or consider adding the TMDB ID tag to the filename to specify the exact item you want to match. More details on this can be found in this guide.
That only works until those morons change the year! And changing data is a hobby for them!
B.t.w you don’t think I don’t have years behind my movies I hope…
TMDB explains ： As explained in our rules, “Theatrical” release dates have priority over “Premiere” release dates to determine the primary release year.
So the date changes when a movie is first released on streaming but gets a theatrical release several years later.
I haven’t run across any movies that this is a problem, could you provide an example or to so I can check to see if I missed some in my library?
I’ve only had a couple with a max of a single year difference and that was easy to justify.
For example, take this film（Guardians of the Formula (2024) — The Movie Database (TMDB). It was first released in its home country of Serbia in 2023, and then subsequently released in theaters in other countries in 2024. As a result, the primary release date for this film changed from 2023 to 2024.
I can see how that may be a inconvenience but it’s still just a year difference and often movies try to get released right at the end of the year so they can qualify for different yearly awards.
This is what I’m interested in, I’ve not run across a movie that was streamed first and then multiple years later be released to theaters.
Sometimes it may not be a streaming release.
If a work initially has no “limited” or “theatrical” type release, TMDB will generate a release year based on its premiere. Later, as long as a release of either of these two types appears with a different year, TMDB’s primary release year will be updated accordingly.
This causes a lot of trouble. Once the year changes, Infuse may misidentify the movie — even the title can be wrong — and I have to fix it manually. But my library has thousands of films, so I can’t possibly notice every change. I usually only realize something is wrong when I want to watch a specific movie and can’t find it. I suggest Infuse allow a tolerance range of plus or minus one or two years when matching by release year. In other words, what about using AI-assisted recognition? @james
Here are some complains from TMDB users:
I had the same headache and wasn’t best please either. I ended up leaving the Year in my filenames by adding the {tmdb-12345} tags in hundreds of files. Which I would rather not have to do. No doubt I’ll end up having to do it again soon with hundreds of more files, if they keep on with what they are doing 
However, there’s a comment in one of those TMDB threads which is interesting:
"Scrapers don’t have to use first theatrical, they can use the world premiere. So is this an issue with a particular scraper or what am I missing?
Using the y command you can easily find the correct movie on TMDb: Animal Farm — The Movie Database (TMDB) "
This is one file I had to add the tag to because the year has now changed to 2026. But the search above does actually return the correct movie.
So I wonder if there is something that could be done within Infuse to translate the search to take advantage of the “y:” type search feature on TMDB, using the year from the media file?
There is a simple reason you don’t - you are in the USA! This whole nonsense with the year has been because TMDB decided to localise the movie’s year date to some assumed “local” release year (almost always 1 year later) - whether or not that is real. So I am in South Africa, over 70% of US movie since the 1920’s lost their metadata. When it comes to “foreign” movies the total is damn near 90%. And I would pretty much bet my life on the fact that 99% of those were never EVER released theatrically in this country.
The only way to solve this I can see right now:
- Infuse is flexible with the year i.e. Casablanca 1942 ~ Casablanca 1943 - choose Casablanca then, rather than “no metadata found”? ESPECIALLY when it was already in the users database!
- Infuse prioritises existing setup until a file is changed or a new one added. Why does it go backwards and update things that have been in the library (my side) with same names, folders, disk drive, server for years!
Right now I guess I am so demoralised by what happened to my library I have just abandoned infuse am just gone back plex again, much as I hate it
Can you give an example where a movie has a different year in TMDB for SA vs US?
I don’t think TMDB is changing these dates very often, if ever. In the case of Casablanca, it seems like TMDB has had the release year listed as 1943 for quite some time. Over the years there have been a few people who put in changes that would have made the release year be 1942, but those were quickly reverted by the mods within a few days. The most recent seems like it was at the end of May 2026, so if you happened to be browsing TMDB around that time then it may have shown 1942.
TMDB’s official policy is to use the theatrical premier date, so things like film festival dates or private screenings may not count whereas those may be recognized on other sites. To me, this seems like a fair and consistent approach.
There were a few changes in the 8.4 update which tightened up how Infuse uses the year when matching, and presently the year used for matching is limited to the primary release year (IE the year shown on the main TMDB details page). This helps avoid many issues with overlapping years, remakes, and different disc releases that I described above.
At the end of the day, we have to have some hard lines around release dates and allowing some fuzzy matching by allowing a range of years kind would introduce more problems than it solves. My recommendation would be to rely on the dates shown on TMDB or consider using TMDB ID tags in the filename as those are certainly never going to change.
I don’t have access to my server right now, but some I remember due to relinking their metadata because I happened to be watching them when I saw they no longer had posters -
Terrence Malick - Badlands
He Walked by Night -
Jake Gyllenhaal - Demolition
Yeah, that’s a lot of work to redo! I’m sure I can find some utility to do the naming and AI to find the info and…and… but really? Why box myself in to a system that is so changeable. I don’t want to have to do this kind of thing everytime someone else changes their mind about how to organise their data.
In any case, I changed away from “English (South Africa)” back to regular “English” (ain’t that confusing! - The difference? - And I mean what exactly is it about South African English that is so important in Infuse anyway that its worth scrambling your metadata for??) and that seems to have taken care of a whole lot of them last time I saw but I am away at the moment so I cant check. Hopefully that has the potential to fix it. Maybe even the posters with no names will also fix, I hope so. My ipad and apple TV are completely different to my mac as most of their posters that work have no titles on them.
Maybe you should just give us better control over our data so that it doesn’t change at some stranger or company’s whim? “Lock” tick box - or “Lock All” ?
Sorry to say that my metadata is not yet completely back to how it was before.
Both the ipad and the Atv show that they are using the latest version and I have the app to do complete rescan of the metadata. This has resulted in differences in the images shown between the two devices.
I have set both units to repeat the scan and will get back here.
At present the movie file called “Queen of the Ring 2024” shows as “WWE King and Queen of the Ring” on the Atv and ipad!
All Micheal Palin’s TV series turn up in “Others” along with a movie file for example called “The.Vast.Of.Night.2020” and the mini series Band of Brothers named as “Band.of.Brothers.MINI-SERIES.E01”
*** Dare I mention that Plex gets all these right first time..
Is it now time to opt for using local metadata??
cheers ‘unhappily’ CD