Customize friend names/icons

Feature Suggestions
21

I’d like to revisit a long-standing feature request that previously gathered significant community support (over 500 votes) but was eventually closed without action. The ability to rename friends within the Friends list would be a simple yet impactful quality-of-life improvement for server owners.

Many users set display names that don’t clearly identify who they are, which can make it difficult for server administrators to manage access, especially on larger shared servers. Allowing server owners to apply local nicknames - visible only to them - would make friend management much easier, reducing confusion when cleaning up inactive users or auditing sharing permissions.

This isn’t about changing someone’s global Plex identity, just providing a local alias feature similar to how contact renaming works in messaging apps. It would bring clarity and organisation to what can otherwise become a cluttered friends list over time.

This has been a recurring community request for years, and implementing it would go a long way toward improving the user experience for anyone who manages a shared Plex environment.

22

I can’t identify half the people I’ve shared with based on username and they’re in my family. Really frustrating when somebody is unnecessarily transcoding and I don’t know who the hell to send a text to, so I have to keep force-ending playback with a “CALL ME DON’T JUST IGNORE THIS" message 47 times

23

Or, they could just show us the email addresses associated with the Plex usernames, we’d recognize those at least.

I got the attention of Plex staff on that topic recently and was told that they knew about the unhappiness with unrecognizable usernames, but also it did not sound like we could expect any improvements on that front.