When I started using plex, I decided to categorize all of my movies based on it genre and now, a few years later, I realize this is a waste and causes duplicate movies and/or not having the movie sequel in the same folder as the original movie. Example: 007 Golden Eye would go into the Action folder and 007 Die Another Day would wind up in the Adventure folder.
I am wanting to know how hard would it be to move all of my movies from the genre folders to the main root folder and still keep all of the data (tags, collections, movies matching, etc) I have added to the file? If I moved the files, would plex autolink to the new file in the new location?
Example:
Current movie path Movie->Action->movies located here, Movie->Comedy->movies located here, etc here
Best follow the procedure from the related support article:
Before you do that, it might be helpful to refresh the library’s metadata to ensure the items are properly matched with the agent specified for this library (otherwise you might lose custom edits if you had changed the library agent while a particular movie is still linked to an old agent).
As a point of reference for anyone following that procedure literally this no longer happens…
As each item is matched, a **2** will appear (duplicate) on each item already in your library . This is expected and desired proof everything is going as expected.
… it might be worth updating that doc to reflect the new way duplicates are handled with plex.
In my experience, it will be fine and no metadata will be lost. Move the files, and rescan. As long as Plex already indexed the base /Movies/ folder instead of each /Movies/Genre/ folders in separate libraries, Plex will just note that the folder location changed slightly and update the location of the file without changing anything else.
I do this fairly often, as I re-organize my movies library. If I notice a movie series that has more than about 3 movies, I create a sub-folder for it (such as /Movies/Die Hard/) and move the movies into that folder. A quick scan of the library, and nothing changes other than that plex plays the videos at the new spot.
If you are concerned about it, take a single movie out of the /Movies/Genre/ and move it to the root of /Movies/ and rescan. Check to see if the metadata has changed. If everything about it is the same other than the file location (Triple Dot > Get Info), then you can be pretty sure that moving all movies out of their sub folder and into the root will work fine.
