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[8139david]

I have used 'Get Movie & TV Info' to get information about 2000 movies.
So now, many movies have several genres.
I'd like to change or delete some of these genres.
For instance, I may want to delete the genre 'Horror'; and I may want to replace 'Mystery' by 'Suspense'.
If I select several movies at once, then try to tag them, it doesn't seem to work because not all movies have exactly the same genres (see attached pic).
How could I do that?

[ferday]

It wouldn't make sense to be able to do this too easily, since the tags are not exactly the same...

You can do replace operations en masse with expressions.  Select a bunch of files, and in the genre field type:

=replace([genre], mystery, suspense)
=replace([genre],horror)

What else are you trying to do with it?  It can be semi automated with good filtering and/or clever smartlisting

[8139david]

Thanks!
This seems to be what I wanted.

Now I need to think hard which genres I want to use, before modifying my library...

[ferday]

Fwiw I made everything into one main genre (for example, action)
Then used keywords for "secondary genres" (for example, adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, etc)

The keywords is a checkbox field which makes it very easy to quickly tag or re-tag from a lot of files at once

For reference, the replace syntax is

Replace([field],old value,new value)

If you leave the new value blank it just erases the old value

[8139david]

Nice!
Would you share your genres and secondary genres?
It would be helpful.

[ferday]

genres: Action, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Fantasy, Family, Horror, Sci-Fi, Suspense, Thriller, War, Western

my sub genres (keywords) is a big list, making it a checkbox field makes it easy to add or subtract as much as i like.  i have all of the genres there (so i could have action-comedy or comedy-action) and then a bunch of stuff like 18A, adventure, animation, crime, foreign, ghost, historical, mystery, romance, sports, zombie...etc. it's a long list at this point

this way i can easily assign a broad genre to a film, which is how i normally think when i'm picking a movie
 
then i can filter it by odd combinations so i can have Action-comedy, or Comedy-action...or Sci-Fi-family-adventure or Sci-Fi-18A-horror, you can just keep filtering down

it's not a perfect system, but by keeping main genres short and simple, i can easily add as many sub genres as i feel like to any given set or subset.  i do a similar thing with my music

[8139david]

I see. Thanks.

[blgentry]

There's an easier way to do this, but it's a little bit awkward.  It relies upon Pane Tagging.  You should be able to do this from the Tagging Window in the Genre field.  Unfortunately, the Genre field has an "edit type" of Standard, which brings up the dialog you show in your screen shot.  A field with an edit type of List works like you'd expect it to.  Try it with Keywords and see the dialog you get instead.  It's much easier to edit.

So instead, we are going to emulate this with Pane Tagging.  See my first screen shot attached.  This is one of my Panes views for movies.  Notice that I have the Genre field set as a Pane and I have Family selected, which narrows the list of movies below down to just those that have a Genre of Family.

Now, go down to the movie list and select all.  Just click and press control-A, or Edit > Select All.  Now the key:  Enable Pane tagging:  Edit > Pane Tagging .  Now it should look like my second screen shot.  Notice the 3 different kinds of boxes next to the genres:

1.  The one that's checked:  That genre is shared by all of the selected files below.  Which makes sense right?  Because that's what you clicked on to narrow down the files to start with.
2.  Empty black boxes:  These are other genres that *some* of the files have.  There's no way of knowing which ones are which, but all of these black boxes are other genres associated with some of the movies selected.
3.  Empty white boxes:  These are available to be selected, but they are not currently associated with any of the selected files.

Now it gets mildly tricky.  If you click on any of those boxes, it will check them and associate them with all of those movies.  The problem is this:  It will replace ALL genres for all files.  All of the black boxes will disappear, because they just got erased from those movies!  You probably don't want that to happen.  If you do that and want to undo it, just press control-z or Edit > Undo .

To selectively add or subtract individual Genres from all files, use Control-Click .  Hold down control while clicking one of the boxes.  You can check or uncheck genres this way.  So adding, removing, or even replacing becomes very easy.

Like I said, it's not super duper easy.  But it's certainly much easier than writing expressions.

Good luck,

Brian.

[8139david]

Thanks, Brian.
Ferday's solution above is so simple I love it.