Allow shortcut-files in libraries

Feature Suggestions
1

Situation:
I have two libraries: One for me and one for my parents.
I don’t want to have all the movies in my library that my parents own and the other way round.
So I made 4 folders

  • Nicola
  • Nicola for Parents
  • Parents
  • Parents for Nicola

My library scans for movies in “Nicola”, “Nicola for Parents” and “Parents for Nicola” and my parents library scans for movies in “Parents”, “Parents for Nicola” and “Nicola for Parents”

So if I own a movie that my parents want to have in their library they simply move the file from “Nicola” to “Nicola for Parents”
This works just fine

Problem:
My sister wants to join the party and now we run in a problem… In theory we could create many more folders which specify like this “Parents for Sister and Nicola” and so on but this get’s weird pretty fast.

In theory we could copy and paste the video files but then we would lose 40GB every time we want to share a movie.

Solution:
It is very easy to create shortcut-files. It would be perfect if the plex server also scans for shortcut-files and then adds the movie into the library. So I could just copy a file from “Parents” and insert a shortcut in my folder “Nicola” and Plex would then recognize the movie and I can enjoy it.

2

Google “symbolic links/symlinks” or “hard links” (depending on whether you’re running a Linux or Windows-based server) and how to create them.

3

What Otto said :wink:
Alternatively you could look into adding Labels to your media to restrict sharing within the main library. As a Plex Pass user you can restrict user access to a library, e.g. by allowing or prohibiting access to movies with certain labels (also works with age restrictions based on content rating… however that’ll work better for kids instead your parents)