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I need to move an image library to a new drive. I am familiar with moving movie and video libraries to another location but not with image libraries. I want to make sure I do not loose the tagging on the images. Is the process the same as other libraries? I thought I should ask before making the move because images don’t have the feature that combines same images into a single media item like other media types do. I wasn’t able to find a guide that was specific to images. If anyone knows of one, it would be appreciated.
There is good information in Chuck’s post below. He linked that in response to questions about photos and videos. I think you can do this safely if have backups. There are so few questions about it, unless you’re going iPhotos > Plex, that it makes me think moving a photo library works well.
You asked about preserving tags. Did you mean to say metadata? Tags can mean several things in this context.
If this is treading on sacred storage, you might ping Chuck.
Would you consider tagging this photos-library too? That might help others later.
Thanks for the info @nibbles . I added that tag to the post. To help clarify, yes, the tags I was referring to were the tag metadata that I have added via the Plex UI. I’ve used tagging as a sort of pseudo playlist because when I move the physical media around the playlists break. So, the Plex metadata tagging is quite important to me.
Okay sounds good that you’re trying to move the Plex metadata for Photos.
If I were doing a database move, I think I’d check my database for errors.
The checks get run against a copy of your DB.
Can do. I hope @ChuckPa has a look at this post too. I’m working on moving my video libraries to my new storage first. After I confirm that is done, I’ll take another snapshot of the database and see if I can tackle the photo library.
Did I scare you? I’ve already got a pre-move backup. I was just saying that I’ll tackle the image library last. I feel like video content libraries are better documented so I’ll get those done first then give myself a way back quickly if needed. One step at a time. No rushing this one!
So, here are my current findings. As it stands right now, I can’t find a way to move a photo library and preserve the metadata. All the methods I have tried have resulted in total loss of the metadata attached to image files. I went about setting up a test library with a few pictures and then added some tags. I edited the server library settings to turn off the trash being emptied automatically and disabled the automatic scan. After that, there was no order of adding folders, removing folders, emptying trash, or scanning, that resulted in the tags being preserved. I tried different combinations of path naming for the location the images were stored as well. Nothing there either. I suppose the closest I ever got was with both the source and destination paths added to the library, it populated it with duplicate images. But with my larger library, merging photos all by hand just isn’t feasible. So, like I said at the top, there doesn’t seem to be a way to move an image library and preserve metadata. At least, there certainly isn’t an obvious way to do it.
Does anyone know of an official channel to ask Plex to comment on my findings?
I created a Photos library on my QNAP PMS the usual way and tagged a few photos.
Then on my NAS I created a new shared folder on the same drive.
I followed the article directions.
Hmmm… that is interesting @nibbles . When you were using the guide did you see images duplicate when you added in the new location and performed the scan?
I figured it out. Seeing duplicate images showing up was the tip off. So, something that guide doesn’t clearly spell out is that the old media can’t exist for the Plex server to find when it starts back up and does its scan. I had copied the images to the new location but left them in the old location as well when I started my server up. When I edited the library and added the new path, it looks like rather than merging the new path items with the old path items, it created new entries in the DB. That left me with the metadata attached to the old images and the images in the new path with no metadata on them. After that, anything I was doing to remove the old image path from the library rightfully took the metadata with it. I thought I was being safe by simply doing a copy and then removing the original path but it seems that’s what was causing the problem. The source can’t be accessible when you restart the server or its a fail.
TL;DR, don’t copy an image library on the file system. Move it.
There was no duplication. I did not need to initiate a scan. Once I saved changes in the library edit window, it scanned automatically, and I saw this on my terminal (where I started plex.sh)
Did I scare you? I’ve already got a pre-move backup. I was just saying that I’ll tackle the image library last. I feel like video content libraries are better documented so I’ll get those done first then give myself a way back quickly if needed. One step at a time. No rushing this one!
