I’ve seen similar features being requested, but I’ve not seen one that conforms to what I would like.
After using Plex for years, and having amassed a massive library (multi-terabyte library of content), I have begun to notice that on my primary drive, the storage for Plex Media Server is utilizing over 100 GBs. Space is a premium for this drive, as it’s an NVME .M2 SSD, and I would prefer to keep this drive lean and mean as best I can. To do this, and have Plex’s database throughput continue to be high-speed with the drive, I believe a feature to clean unused assets would be beneficial for ALL users.
For example: Every artist, album, movie, TV show, what-have-you has stored metadata and media onto the hard drive. Some artists, movies, and TV shows have MANY images that are downloaded for the media cover image, as well as background image, and in TV show cases, season image and episode image. This complicates matters by over the years, adding up to store these completely unused assets.
The feature: A button, or scheduled task, or something where a user could kick off a cleanup of ALL unused assets, or even assets of a particular library that may be HUGE. This way, we can clear out space that was used unnecessarily, and continue to make improvements on the efficiency of the server, locally.
If we ever want to update or refresh the assets, it’s not difficult to re-match the media, which would automatically download assets again. Then, when we’re finished, a scheduled job for cleaning unused assets could run and keep everything lean and mean.
