Duplicate Review metadata synchronization is easy to misunderstand

[Bianconera]

I have searched the existing feature requests, both open and closed, to make sure this is not a duplicate request.

• Yes

The feature

While using Duplicate Review, I initially thought I had discovered a bug because assets were unexpectedly appearing in my albums and descriptions were being copied between videos.

After several hours of investigation, I found that this is actually the intended behavior documented in the Duplicates Utility documentation:

• Album membership is synchronized
• Descriptions are synchronized
• Tags are synchronized
• Favorites are synchronized
• Ratings are synchronized

Only after reading the documentation carefully did I realize that the behavior was caused by metadata synchronization during duplicate resolution.

For photo libraries this behavior makes sense.

However, for large video libraries, the result can be surprising:

• Keeping multiple assets can suddenly add dozens of videos to an album.
• Descriptions can appear on many assets.
• Users may think their albums were modified unexpectedly.
• Users may suspect a bug, stack issue, or database problem.

Would it be possible to improve the user experience by:

1. Showing a warning before resolving duplicates:
   “Album membership, descriptions, tags, favorites and ratings will be synchronized between kept assets.”

or

2. Providing optional checkboxes to control which metadata should be synchronized.

I think this would make Duplicate Review much easier to understand and would prevent confusion for users who are working with large video collections.

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile