Create a Library with Sub Libraries

Feature Suggestions
1

I’d like to suggest expanding the library creation/management process.
I’ve been collecting movies and music for almost 30 years - migrating media from VHS to DVD to Digital or vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD, DVD to digital.
For users or collectors with such large libraries and if you are like me and have a NAS or more, your library and collection can be very large.

For Example Movies. Currently I have almost 3500 movies. The are currently organized as follows on a sinology DS1812+ Video\Movies\0-Numbers, A, B, C, D, E, ect… So Iron Man would be in the folder Video\Movies\I\Iron Man. Each movie is in its own folder under the alphabet letter parent folder of its title.
Examples
Video\Movies\0\8 Mile
Video\Movies\0\8 Degrees of Separation
Video\Movies\A\Absolute Zero
Video\Movies\I\ Iron Man
Video\Movies\I\ Iron Man 2
Video\Movies\I\ Iron Man 3
ect…

My Music Library follows a similar structure Music\0 , A, B, C, ect… with the artist under their alphabetic letter.

TV Shows follow the same alphabetic directory structure

It is the only method to keep managing content somewhat reasonable with larger libraries.

The Feature Request would be for either the existing Add Library function to be able to recognize directory structures or more realistically be able to create a Parent Library type that points to the primary folder \Movies and then allow you to add sub library or list.
For Example
Create a Library called Movies then under that library create a Library Movies - A (or just “A”) so additional libraries can be organized under the parent.
Libraries
…\Movies
…\Movies"A"
…\Movies"B"
…\Movies"C"
or
…\Movies"Action"
…\Movies"Drama"
…\Movies"Horror"
…\Movies"Anime"
etc…

While this process means you have to go through the library setup/creation process for each sub library at least it can help you stay organized and manage content grouping. it is not realistic to dump 3500 movie folders into one directory, even breaking it into categories Drama, Action could mean very long directory list, especially when it comes to music.

2

You could create collections for “A”, “B”, “C”, etc.

Select all movies beginning with “A,” click the Edit icon, and put the letter “A”, by itself, in the Collections field. Repeat for B, etc.

When you view your movie library by Collections, you’ll see something like this:
image

3

Er, if you view your library sorted by movie title, you already get a jump list of letters on the right side of the screen.
I’m not sure what you hope to gain with these sub libraries.

Make yourself familiar with the filters on offer.
You can filter the full list down by a certain criterium, like
genre or year or decade or country or director or…

4

You kind of missed the point of the post and the description of the existing folder structure. All 3500 movies are not just in 1 parent directory (that would be unmanageable). They exist in a primary folder called Movies with sub folders A…Z (26 sub folders). So if you have a movie such as A simple Life it is under the folder structure of Movies\A\A Simple Life. When I created a movie Library in Plex and pointed it to the root folder Movies it created a messed up library structure because it doesn’t understand nested folder structures.

I’ve seen countless post on Plex not supporting Nested Folders etc.

I didn’t see any post on possibly making it support Libraries and sub libraries. This way you still don’t have to support nested folder structures in Plex but could allow users to create nested/grouped libraries. Another possibility would be to allow a library to point to multiple folders for its content instead of just 1.

1 Like
5

That sounds weird.
I would agree with you if we were talking about tv shows, but with movies there should be no side effect from those “index letter” folders.

That is already possible, as long you are not going above 40 - 50 folders.

add_folder_english
add_folder_english729×527 24.4 KB

6

I like your advice. I want to be able to click on one library and see only those pertinent media items. This is mainly for music where I would like to be able to separate Classical Music from everything else. Some might feel the same about separating jazz or country from pop or classical.
If I want to listen to violin, piano or opera, I don’t want to see Ed Sheeran, Dire Straits or Dizzy Gillespie

7

That’s a bit of a different question than the OP, but, because of the different nature of classical music (composer-centric, rather than artist-centric), I keep two music libraries - one for classical, and one for everything else.

Plex needs some changes in the way it handles metadata tags before it can manage classical music in a reasonable way. I’ve created a comprehensive feature request to make this happen. Please add your vote if you agree.

1 Like
8

I think it would be interesting to be able to create subdirectories.
For example:
Library -> 4K UHD
/sublibrary -> Movies
/sublibrary -> Series
etc…

1 Like
9

I hope this is not redundant.
A nice to have little feature would be allowing to have nested libraries. For example have a structure similar to
“Documentaries”
“Documentaries”-“WWII”
“Documentaries”-“National Geo”
“Library”-“Sub-Library”-“Sub-Sub-Library1”
“Library”-“Sub-Library”-“Sub-Sub-Library2”

And this structure could be completely independent of the directory structure in the filesystem, meaning the nesting hierarchy presented does not have reflect the structure of the directories where the actual files are stored. So it would require no changes to the scanners.

It could be as simple as to allow the front-end to allow to move libraries into other libraries. For example when you point to a library and you click the ‘…’ add the option “Move…”. And then you browse the list the libraries and sub-libraries and select the one under which you would like to move the first library.

Christmas is in 19 days. Thanks for this cool product.

3 Likes
10

71cb53156d6e46f076155287a978ef30b7ff3d89_2_690x291

This article was posted on reddit.

It hasn’t been mentioned in the plex forum yet, so I’m posting it.
I, who posted this article, also desperately need this feature.
My PLEX library list is over 60.
I use symbols such as “( ), _, -” in the title to separate and create multiple internal user accounts so that only a specific library is visible for each user. The problem with this method is that there is a functional limitation in data search, and it is cumbersome to change the account every time the video category changes.

So, as posted on reddit, I am also requesting a feature suggestion for a sub-category of the library.
original reddit post
Subcategory Feature Requests Post