Does Plex store .jpg, .db, xml etc files in the shared folders?

Over the years I have used various media player/server combinations, with Plex being the most over the past few years. I have remnants I believe from past server programs, especially XBMC that I would like to know if I can safly remove?

There is .jpg for fanart/covers, image.xml files, thumbs.db etc that I wouldn’t assume is for Plex as the computer my actual plex server runs on has almost 500GB taken up just by the plex library metadata. I went through and did a wildcard search for .jpg files and deleted around 730 files. I then did a wildcard for .db files and found 241 files - there is absolutely more than 241 TV episodes, and some of those .db files have date on them of 2008 and some have a date of January 2017 which made me pause - if Plex does’t store metadata in the individual folders for each show why are some so current? I have one show with a thumbs.db date 2017 and the next closest is 2015.

Can I safely delete anything in my media folders besides the media itself? AFAIK plex stores everything on the computer hosting the plex server.

On a sidenote, I do use sickrage which is installed on my Synology to manage my tv collection but it doesn’t do anything else in my setup.

Thanks!

thumbs.db is made by Windows itself. It contains thumbnails of your media files which are used when you inspect them with Windows file explorer.

Plex never writes into the media folders.
Except when you use the ‘optimize’ feature or the DVR feature. But you would know that, I assume if you use these features.

You should be aware that Plex is able to use sidecar poster.jpg files or sidecar subtitle files. Or -trailer files. Or song lyrics files in .txt or .lrc format.




But it doesn’t write any of these itself.

Perfect thank you! I will delete those extra files with reckless abandon :smiley: I haven’t used the DVR at all, i used to use Siliconedust and had a 16 Tuner Cablecard DVR running with Windows Media Center if I remember correctly - might be fun to use that again with plex although at this point I’m much more interested in hardware encoding and variable bitrates depending on upload bandwidth and number of active remote streams I think. One of those is a work in progress and the other i’d be amazed to see implemented but I hope i’m amazed one day!

Thank you :slight_smile: