That might explain what's happening, but it's counter-intuitive to me for a duplicate item to show up in a collection but "Show in Collection" to ignore it.
I think the underlying issue is my not fully understanding what duplicates really are and how DVDpedia treats them in different contexts. Here's a specific example:
• Select items in an excluded collection
• Run
File > New Collection From Selection (Shift-Command-N), which creates a new
included collection
• Select that new collection and run
File > Exclude Collection From Library
• The "Show in Collection" menu shows an item selected in the new collection as also being in the original collection
• Also, the old and new excluded collections are displayed in the "Collection Names" column when its enabled in View Options
That confused me because I thought items in the new collection would be distinct from those in the original after converting the new collection from included to excluded. And when I add a new item to that new collection that already exists in the old one it
will be a distinct, separate copy.
This makes it harder to determine what DVDpedia considers a duplicate vs. a separate copy. In DEVONthink, a "duplicate" refers to a separate copy of an item and a "replicant" refers to another instance of the same item. If you modify a duplicate in DT only that copy is change; modifying a replicant changes all instances of it.
My suggestion is to make that difference between same and unique "duplicate" items clearer in DVDpedia, like it is to me in DEVONthink (by how they're named and displayed). Last night I got burned by not immediately seeing the difference, changing items in a new excluded collection thinking they were unique, while unknowingly also changing the original copies until noticing that was happening. I could recover the original collection from the Delicious Library 2 export it came from, but now I don't see any reason to have it; all the metadata I want from it is preserved with the new (modified) collection.
And the fun didn't stop there when I started using folders. This screen capture after running
View > Show Duplicates on a folder shows what I'll describe afterwards:
You might have to open it in a separate window to see the Collection Names column on the right, which is key to understanding this issue. Under it you'll notice that some (not all) items are listed as being in the IMDb
collection, but IMDB is only a
folder (as seen under the Collections list on the left). This is puzzling; I still haven't thought of a good explanation for it.
Finally, this bug:
After moving larger numbers of items (at least 100, maybe more) between collections there was a problem with additional commands. For example, it would take two clicks for a selection to change. Or, the app would Quit with Command-Q until after a mouse click. It happened several times during my bulk moves and I could probably reproduce it again.
I'll end by saying that I consider these issues important but they won't stop me from using DVDpedia. They've caused a bumpier journey towards getting my video collections manageably cataloged, but haven't forced me off a cliff.