Server Version#: 1.25.3.5409-7000
Player Version#: 1.35.1.2632-c6783c78
Running Plex Media Server on my Synology NAS I see that the /PlexMediaServer/AppData/Plex Media Server/Cache/PhotoTranscoder contains over 6.5 GB of data.
Is this Normal? Is it possible to delete this cache without issues?
Yeap, I purge that weekly and have been doing so for years as it can grow massively. Just make sure plex is not running before deleting.
Just for giggles, my PT folder is 68GB. Nothing in there is older than a few weeks, though. What’s the point in purging that, doku?
Mine grew to over 150GB at one point and was impacting backups so decided to create a cron job to nuke it (as well as some other stuff). I guess I could have just excluded it. Anyhow, from what I remember its a cache used by the clients. So when you scroll through your library the artwork shown on the client gets created in this PhotoTranscoder cache. I’m open to correction on that but that’s what I recall. I also seem to remember it has duplicate files all over the place so was not even very efficient.
To be honest, I don’t even think about it anymore as I delete it weekly.
So the procedure will be the following?
1 - Stop Plex Media Server
2 - Delete the PhotoTranscoder folder
3 - Restart Plex Media Server
Will the contents just be rebuilt in a few days?
Why is it the cause of it growing since you purge it weekly?
I typically delete the contents of the folder and not the folder itself. This is basically what I do …
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-in\ Support/Caches/*
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-in\ Support/Data/*
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-in\ Support/Metadata\ Combination/*
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Cache/PhotoTranscoder/*
But otherwise, yes. Stop, delete & start again.
Would be interesting to see how quickly it goes back up after a purge. Have you checked?
It recreates. As soon as you open a client and view something it will create this cache for it again and again and again.
Its about 700MB on my server ATM and the cron job ran last night. Can get up to about 20GB in a week from what I remember but has been a while since I checked.
Man, you really clean out everything! 
I’ve been watching the overall size of all those folders closely for a long time, and to be honest, it doesn’t fluctuate much. My entire Plug-in Support folder is 11GB.
I should probably mention that this particular server has been up and running since late 2017, and I’ve never cleared out anything Plex-related. Get ready for the total size of my data folder:
Took ten minutes just to calculate, and probably reduced the life-span of my poor NVMe significantly in the process 
NOTE: This is without any video preview thumbnails, chapters, intros, audio analysis, etc. Bundles cleaned & database optimized daily. No slowness or any other issues.
EDIT: Interesting to see there are so many more folders than files. Plex devs, could we perhaps add an automated way to get rid of empty/unnecessary folders?
Wow, 150GB of which almost half is this cache 
My library is likely smaller than yours with 3,200+ movies and 28,000+ episodes and I don’t have video thumbs enabled but my total plex server size is 18 GB uncompressed when I nuke this cache. These are my folder sizes as of now …
4.0K /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Diagnostics
4.0K /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/plexmediaserver.pid
4.0K /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins
4.0K /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Preferences.xml
116K /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Crash Reports
11M /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs
45M /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Logs
1.4G /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support
2.3G /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache
3.9G /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Media
12G /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata
You can also see my cache has increased from 700MB last night to 2.3GB this morning.
EDIT: In addition, to confirm my duplicate comment above I checked …
xxx@dokuro:/data/Personal/Scripts$ find '/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache' -type f -print | wc -l
12471
xxx@dokuro:/data/Personal/Scripts$ fdupes -r -m '/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache'
1083 duplicate files (in 828 sets), occupying 405.9 megabytes
Overtime from what I remember this gets exponentially worse. I seem to also remember an old thread on this where plex said its just how it works and does some purge monthly. However, this whole cache seems pointless to me and I speak from experience as I’ve been deleting it weekly for well over a year now.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this cache for the past few days and as I suspected its growing and growing on my system.
xxxx@dokuro:/data/Personal/Scripts$ du -sh '/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache'
4.8G /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache
xxxx@dokuro:/data/Personal/Scripts$ find '/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache' -type f -print | wc -l
25828
xxxx@dokuro:/data/Personal/Scripts$ fdupes -r -m '/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache'
4609 duplicate files (in 3416 sets), occupying 1451.9 megabytes
xxxx@dokuro:/data/Personal/Scripts$
Current at 4.8GB after just a couple of days with almost 1.5GB of it being reported as duplicate files.
I’ll check again after a full week and see how bad its got on my system.
FYI… found a feature request for this cache to be improved so added a comment over there → Cache/PhotoTranscoder Folder Size Sanity Check - #21 by netsurge3
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