Find Duplicates Does not remember

Hello,

Regarding the “Find Duplicates” feature.

I have a lot of duplicates (intentionally) - Once I perform a duplicates search and when I tell CLZ Movies Web to “Keep 2” (or however many) it does it. But, If I run the find duplicates feature again, it doesn’t remember that I told it to “keep 2” (or however many) - This is very frustrating because I have lots of duplicates (too many to sort in one go) and when I go back to sorting, all the titles I have previously sorted and told to keep are shown again!

Is there a setting somewhere I’m not seeing?

Yes, that is how it works. The Find Duplicates tool is meant to go through your entire collection again, trying to spot possible duplicates.

Trying to understand your use case:

  1. can you explain why you have so many duplicates? Many I can help you make the entries different so that they are not marked as duplicates again.
  2. what is the reason that you need to run this tool regularly? This tool is mostly meant as a maintenance / problem solving tool, to run only when something went wrong.

If I own the DVD of a movie/show and i upgrade to Blu-Ray and/or 4K that means i have 2-3 copies of that movie. I know i can go to “Edition” and check all the versions for one title, but each of my titles has its own barcode ergo it deserves its own entry.

The reason i do it this way is simple - if i am in a store and need to know weather or not i own a particular title I use my app to scan the barcode on the back of the box to tell if I have the DVD version or Blu-ray version.

Also, there are instances where I own a TV Series by individual seasons each with their own barcodes, plus, I own “The complete series Box Set” with a different barcode. Again, it’s all about knowing where each of my unique barcode items are.

I know i could perform a manual search, but scanning the barcode is much, much more convenient and faster. Conversely, if a friend or family member want to borrow a movie and they specifically want the DVD version of a title ( because they don’t have a blu-ray player) then i can quickly scan the DVD barcode to lend it out but still have the title in stock on Blu-ray should someone else want it.

As i stated in my original post, i have so many duplicates due to the above reasons and i can not sort through the long list in one go! I like to sort the duplicates a few at a time whenever i have free time. Sometimes the duplicates were created by mistake but most of the times it’s because I own 2-3 versions of it.

I understand you would like to remember to ignore certain movies when they are dupes. That is easier than it sounds I think because what if you have 3 copies of a movie, which you deem “not duplicate” - but then you add another one from the same title by accident which is a duplicate? Would it be ignored as you said to the other 3 copies to ignore those in the “Find Duplicates” screen? (I’m just trying to find out what you would find logical here) - and would you need to be able to “disable the ignore on movies” (meaning an extra screen where you can uncheck all those “ignore” checkboxes for certain movies)? - Don’t get me wrong I get your reasoning, but I’m trying to dive a bit deeper into how a user would expect this to work (and how far the user wants to go here).

Tip: (perhaps you’ve already tried this) : When using “Find Duplicates” you have a dropdown at the top where you can make it find duplicates based on certain fields. Perhaps setting that to Title AND Format, already helps your issue a bit?

I understand why you have duplicates in your database. What you are doing is fully reasonable and quite normal amongst our users.

But I feel like you did not answer my question…
What is the reason that you need to run this tool regularly?

If there were mistakes in the past, then using the tool ONCE would let you fix that, right?

Well, the short answer is I don’t need to run the tool regularly. Once I’ve finished sorting my collection, maybe it would be just a once a year thing for maintenance reasons.

But at the moment because I haven’t sorted my collection I’m using it regularly until I do sort my collection. Does that make sense?

A search of my collection for duplicates returns what seems like dozens and dozens of results. I DONT HAVE TIME to go through every result IN ONE GO. So instead, I sort as many duplicates as I am able to IN ONE SESSION then I exit CLZ. The next time I have some extra time to spend on sorting I open CLZ again and perform the duplicate search to CONTINUE where I LEFT OFF.

A suggestion would be to have an option/check box in the options of the search to “Ignore previous duplicates marked as ‘keep’”

I hope this answers your question now?

For how long would you want to ignore them?

What if tomorrow you add another copy of a movie tomorrow, where you’ve already marked 2 other versions as “I’ve already checked this one” ? Would you want to be able to “undo” the “set to ignore”?

Tip: (perhaps you’ve already tried this) : When using “Find Duplicates” you have a dropdown at the top where you can make it find duplicates based on certain fields. Perhaps setting that to Title AND Format, already helps your issue a bit?

The list might just become shorter, and you can just go through it in one morning/afternoon/evening.