sometimes i want to give people acccess to just a subset of my movies. right now the only way to to do this is to duplicate (on the file system level) those movies into a new folder then create a section from that folder in plex and share that section to a specific user. this is not very elegant and a waste of space.
i've tried to alias/symlink the files into a new folder instead. plex will see and scan them but won't play back (probably because the user doesn't have access to the files at their /original/ location).
wouldn't it be possible to implement a system (in the plex interface) whereby we can add the same movie file to multiple sections?
Poor man’s solution. Let’s say you have Movies and Shared Movies. You would make sections like this:
Movies
folder movies1
folder shared
Shared Movies
folder movies2
folder shared
Where movies1 contain private collection, movies2 only those you wan’t to share, while folder shared contains titles that should appear in both sections.
I symlink everything and don't have any problems with it. I created a group 'media', and added myself, a couple of family members and the plex user to it and gave read access rights to my movies directory. I don't know how your access rights are set up, but symlinking is definitely a good solution.
