Allow more flexible structure for personal media

Feature Suggestions
1

Using series/season/episode for personal media is very restrictive.  Please allow multi-tier hierarchy that mirrors folder structure.  In addition there should be a way to add description for any folder level via the description text file.

 

For example it is currently not possible to add personal videos using the following hierarchy and add metadata at any level:

 

\2014\Hawaii\Pearl Harbor\*.mp4
\2014\Hawaii\Waikiki Beach\*.mp4
\2014\Someone's Birthday\*.mp4
\2014\California\Disneyland\*.mp4
\2014\California\SeaWorld\*.mp4

 

Using folder view prevents me from viewing any metadata about the folders and using TV Show scanner forces me to use series\season\episode structure which is not a natural way to view video collections for a specific year.  One possibility is to default Personal Media libraries to use a version of folder view that also displays metadata for the folder (if there are cover/banner/description files stored in that folder)

2

If you have multiple years for say Hawaii trips or trips to Disneyland, or any event that you have videos for for multiple years you could structure the folder as follows.

/Home Videos
  /Hawaii
    /2013 
     Hawaii - S2013E01 - videoname.mp4
     Hawaii - S2013E02 - videoname.mp4
    /2014
     Hawaii - S2014E01 - videoname.mp4
     Hawaii - S2014E02 - videoname.mp4
 /Disneyland
    /2013 
     Disneyland -S2013E01 - videoname.mp4
     Disneyland - S2013E02 - videoname.mp4
    /2014
     Disneyland - S2014E01 - videoname.mp4
     Disneyland - S2014E02 - videoname.mp4

I do it this way and when I select Disneyland, for example,  each year is shown as a season with all the videos from that year listed as episodes.

3

But what if I want to group all my videos by year, and subgroup them by event.  When I am watching Hawaii vacation videos for 2014 and then want to watch California vacation videos for 2014 I don't want to go up to the root level and then go to California vacation and subsequently to 2014.  As oppose to watching all seasons of a TV show sequentially, personal media is usually watched chronologically.  What if one has for example videos of European vacation for a specific year, broken down by countries and events and each event containing multiple videos .  It is very difficult to shoehorn this hierarchy into series/season/episode hierarchy, so I believe that support for a more flexible hierarchy is needed.

4

For that I select "Type = Episodes" to see all episodes at once.

Then I ad a "Filter by year", and select the year I want to see

This will allow me to watch everything from the selected year in any order I choose, by date, by name, and so on

5

But what if I want to group all my videos by year, and subgroup them by event.  When I am watching Hawaii vacation videos for 2014 and then want to watch California vacation videos for 2014 I don't want to go up to the root level and then go to California vacation and subsequently to 2014.  As oppose to watching all seasons of a TV show sequentially, personal media is usually watched chronologically.  What if one has for example videos of European vacation for a specific year, broken down by countries and events and each event containing multiple videos .  It is very difficult to shoehorn this hierarchy into series/season/episode hierarchy, so I believe that support for a more flexible hierarchy is needed.

 
tag your stuff then filter by 2014 then filter by California. 
 
just like you can filter by movies made in 2014  by brad pitt then sort by date released.

 

As oppose to watching all seasons of a TV show sequentially, personal media is usually watched chronologically.

 
tv shows are chronological and sequential so i don't know what you mean by this.
6

another example of where having just a simple folder view of personal media would be good is here: I download course material to view. This consists of a set of videos. I want an easy way to separate course 1 from course 2. On the file system I do this by having a course 1 folder and a course 2 folder. But when Plex imports them it flattens the folder structure and then interleaves the videos because they follow a 1. type naming convention. 

7

Early 2021 clean-up: implemented (folder mode, option to include videos in collections…)