Hi there,

ID’s do not change. What you may have seen is a duplicate that was deleted. In these cases, it is TMDb policy to keep the earliest (smallest) ID. Although from time to time, a moderator may have chosen the larger ID to keep.

Thanks for the information. But what about the ID from the deleted duplicated movie? Won't it be reassigned to another new movie in the database?

No problem. No, deleted ID’s are never reused.

Sorry for re-opening a long old thread.

I've recently began using this api again after a decent hiatus, and this time around was planning on using the imdb id as the unique identifier for local table storage, but since I discovered this thread, it would be vastly more optimal to use tmdb id instead. In my paranoia though, just want to confirm that this is still the active scenario for ids. That once an id is assigned to a type instance, i.e. this movie id = this movie, that correlation at least for 99% of instances/records will remain linked, and I won't have to worry about the id changing for that movie or that movie changing to a different id....? or.... does this duplicate movie instance occurrence happen often enough (where a new or old id will be deleted in favor of another) that I should remain dedicated to using the imdb id instead for long-term uniqueness in stability.

Thank you

Yes, this is still the case. ID's are never reused.

There's not really any way I could say how often duplicate items are created. TMDB is a crowd sourced database, people can create duplicates at any time if they choose to.