So been having Plex for a while and is now preparing a big server to hold my very large movie collection.
I was thinking of arranging movies by sub letter so like this
Movies
A
Armageddon 19XX
Arms of Force 19XX
B
Break 19XX
Bullet 19XX
This leads to the question of article i.e. A AN and THE, you never index by any of them and normally in a library you would never put a book called “The Bill” on in the shelf of books with a title starting T but on the shelves for books having a title starting with B.
Now you could the ague I should just put the folder “The Bill 19XX” under B, but the question I have is if you remove the “The” i.e. name the directory “Bill 19XX” will still Plex find the right stuff out on the internet. This question is valid for both Movies, Series, and Music in my view.
This is maybe more relevant when you don’t have sub folder for each char of the alphabet, but a single music directory. Then “The Beatles” “The Monkeys” etc would be nice to have names just as “Beatles”, “Monkeys” reason being that sometimes groups drops the A, the An, and the The in their names so things becomes very messy.
Next question is spaces. It would be very nice if Plex is supporting a special char as space, is it so? In “grep” regexp then the “.” can be a single char including space so “More.of.spring.19XX” would be valid. Though I assume the more common _ (underscore) would be nice as substitute for space (very common in the Unix world). Anyways is there any sub for spaces as spaces in filenames aren’t very pretty.
You can drop the leading article from the movie name – but this will impact the matching. It might still work for some but your chances dwindle.
Why not just group them “B” movies in your “B” folder but keep their actual names?
Movies > B > The Bill (19xx)
Question 2: Can you replace spaces with e.g. dots?
Yes you can
General remark…
Try to actually stick with Plex’ naming conventions and at least put the movie’s release year in brackets!!
It might.
I can tell you for me every article is at the last of the filename after comma and plex has never had an issue matching the movie.
ABCs of Death 2, The (2014)
Boy Who Cried Werewolf, The (2010)
Night They Saved Christmas, The (1984)
Boyfriend for Christmas, A (2004)
Woman of Paris, A (1923)
Thanks for your reply, the article in the end is pretty neat, and yes year in brackets is no issue, it was actually me just forgetting to put it in bracket in my example.
After thinking about it I will stick to having the article in the front for movies and series, but as suggested put the in the right folder so “The Bill” will be in the B folder.
For music on the other hand I think I will not have the article in the front, but rather in the rear or totally removed. It can still be in the tags in side the audio files itself. Though I will do some experimenting before settling. I’m starting with the video media so still have plenty of time.
Keep in mind that your file and folder names don’t necessarily influence how the media are presented within Plex.
Plex is using a so-called ‘Sort Title’ for listing items. And that sort title is built automatically from the original movie title, album title or artist name by removing articles like The, El, Der, Das etc.
So the whole discussion above is only about how your file list is going to look like, at which nobody is looking while using Plex.
