I seem to recall some shortcoming in Movies/Shows Libraries when doing that, but don’t recall the details. Best research that one before any long-term actions are committed to.
The best advice is still:
don’t use Plex to view by folder - it’s not designed for that anyway.
get used to the differences in Plex and your file manager.
Like the rest of us that don’t want to Fix Match for every Movie/Show we add - we name our files correctly.
Also:
Working outside the box, but still inside Plex - Abuse Collections instead:
Plex had no idea users would do that with 'em, but users will do just about anything and Collection Abuse doesn’t (yet) have any shortcomings that are show-stoppers (that I have discovered).
I am 100% with you brianara3. This bothers me, too, as I store my movies in folder names where the article is always at the end with a comma preceding. As much as I want to automate management of my Plex library, it is perfectly reasonable to not want to search through dozens or hundreds of movies that start with “The…” when looking for a movie.
The fact of the matter is that it worked for YEARS and now it does not.
I have my movies in folders A-B-C, D-E-F, G-H-I etc. The Sting is in Folder S, not folder S-T-U. There are 58 movies in that folder that start with “the”. They are all alphabetized so they aren’t hard to scan. If that is too much, you can always break your movies into folders by single letter. The S’s would only have 26 then.
If renaming is a pain, get Bulk Rename Utility and make it easy.
I have one movie folder…
Look for a movie I enter it in search, and partial names work, so ‘The’ or ‘A’ aren’t an issue
no need to create so many folders.
Long time listener, first time caller. The original poster has been treated shabbily here and it’s very disappointing. I came here with the same problem. Many of you told him you’re wrong, shut up, go away. Unfortunately, he was correct. That doesn’t mean the way you dump all your files into one folder with 30% named, “The blah blah blah” is wrong. Nor is the way you likely don’t sort your laundry before you wash. But it’s an unnecessary pain for Plex to force us to manually match these files so that THE is at the front of the string. Seriously. It is no effort at all for a programmer to scan the string for a final A or THE and analyze the sting accordingly. It would take less time to do that and test it than we’ve spent sniping at people in this thread. I’ll hang up and listen to your response.
Not sure I know what you mean. What media manager? PLEX isn’t a media manager. It is a media streaming server. My media is on a synology NAS that is also a server I can access remotely so I have the media arranged in a way that makes it easy for me or my friends who have logons to the server can find stuff. But mostly me. PLEX can look multiple folder levels down so it doesn’t really care what my directory depth is as long as the folder names and file names work.
It sure is a Media Manager from the very start… and it expanded from there…
My media is also on several Synology NAS units… That no one but me has direct access to.
Even Plex only has read access, so if there is a Plex update that allows users the ability to delete, they can’t…
(I’m thinking that would be a really bad software bug, but could happen)
What it can or could do isn’t the same as what it actually does.
Well I hope everything works out…
Plex is a pretty good media manger, but has fallen behind in it core features.
This is a dumpster fire. I also have this issue. Enabling local media assets in the agent stack fixes it, but I like to disable that in case plex grabs some bad meta data in the file.
In agreement with the previous posters. Lifetime Plex Pass user here and Plex member before Plex Pass was a thing. Up until about 3 months ago, I had never had any issue finding movies when named the way that everyone has mentioned. To say that this many people were “just lucky” for this amount of time is asinine. Something has clearly changed and all we’re trying to figure out is what that is. To say “You’re doing it wrong”, “Just use the right naming convention”, “This is the ONLY solution” is not constructive in the least. If this was not the intended behavior, then say that it was a bug for all of those years and it’s just now starting to function correctly and follow the “industry convention”. Finally, to say that going to Emby, TMDB, TVDBm, or IMDB does not show the titles listed in that manner is not an accurate comparison. To Plex’s own credit, they allow you to have a Display Title and Sort Title. What is to say that these sites are not the same? When my movies are displayed in Plex, it shows “The Lion King”. However, the sort title is “Lion King, The”. Just seems to be a lot of anger towards a paying customer and someone just looking for help.
As an update to this topic that all of the “experts” have abandoned, this issue seems to only be occurring with newly released movies ~2019-2020. So if EVERY other movie before 2019 is correctly identified with the “Title, The” movie convention, then how does the “JuSt UsE tHe CoRrEcT nAmInG cOnVeNtIoN” work when clearly that is not the case for any of the other movies until now. Something in the process has changed or broken and now people are trying to say “Oh it’s always been that way” or “Just do it another way”. No, it hasn’t always been that way as evidenced by the slew of people with this issue and no, if no one can definitively provide evidence to support that this, is in fact, the absolute wrong way to name your movies and it’s impossible to get correct metadata any other way (Hint: it’s not) then don’t hide behind lame excuses.
I don’t understand what is going on here. Why is a simple feature request by paying users being met with, “You are doing it wrong. This will not be debated any further!” This hostility is not warranted and not welcome by paying customers.
No, we are not doing it wrong. I would like to upvote this feature request as well. People still need to manage files manually and while the name of the movie is “The Lion King” the name is the file is correctly named “Lion King, The”
I can confirm that something stopped working in Plex at some point. With a library of over 4000 movies I had no issues with ,The and ,A in filenames until recently. Suddenly I need to manually match films that I did not have to before. Luck does not come into play here.
I think customers can be satisfied here without making any sacrifices by adding a little logic to the searcher.
I have also noticed this happening recently and understand frustrations with this. Either something in Plex or how the Agent matches has changed.
Providing some suggestions on what to look at would be helpful.
Actually, I just spent a bit of time playing around with the manual matching and it seems only the legacy Plex Movie agent [“Plex Movie (Legacy)”] is no longer doing the match if the movie has “The” or “A” at the end instead of the front.
I switched to the new “Plex Movie” and when testing a few movies it now matches the films correctly:
