I’ve been adding several movies to my PMS, and am starting to feel that my decent-sized 007 collection is taking up considerable real estate in my Movies library. Plus it’s got me thinking about how to organize things so that certain genres, or series or whatnot are grouped together.
So I’m wondering: How do you organize your films? Do you have multiple Movie Libraries, separated into (for example) Comedy, Disney, 007, et al.; Do you have your movie collections in TV Show Libraries, (so as to have a similar tiered effect but with a single Movie Library and genre-appropriate posters); do you use Genres or Collections as currently implemented? (Genre titles can be searched for; Collection titles can not.); Or anything else entirely?
I’m fishing for ideas here. All of my movies are currently in one base folder, in one single Library and I’m thinking of changing it but haven’t started yet until I’ve decided where I’m going with it. I don’t have a super-heck-of-a-whole-lot of movies. I currently stand at 230 in the Movies Library. But with 18 007 films at the top (and counting), you can see what’s got me wondering what to do about it.
I just use the sort by field and enter info like 007-01, and so on for each film in the series. Doing this ensures when I browse my library they show up next to each other and in the right order.
I divided my movie libraries into a three folder structure within the main movie folder and then create and direct each folder to each of its own Movie Libraries in Plex. So when a kid in the family wants to watch something all I have to do is direct them to a home user account and that account only has permission to that library and folder.
I also created a 4th Movie Library in Plex that is named Full Movie Collection that reads from all three movie folders and displays every movie in my system. I do it this way primarily because Plex is awful still in creating Playlists and Collections out of huge libraries.
Heiarchy as follows:
Movies
Kid and Family Friendly Library (folder 1)
General Movie Library (folder 2)
Favorite Movie Library (folder 3)
With 230 movies total, the library size is still pretty manageable that you could be a little creative in how you organize. I’m approaching 1100 movies and I’m still able to find what I want with a flat organization. There are some gimmes like all the Star Wars and Star Trek movies, which are really easy to group. But certain series of movies with varying titles I can still group together. For example, The Bourne Identity movies… They all have the normal title names but the Sort Titles are Bourne Identity/Bourne 1, Bourne Supremacy/Bourne 2, Bourne Ultimatum/Bourne 3, Bourne Legacy/Bourne 4 and, for Jason Bourne, it’s Bourne 5. It’s one of those things where I just have to know that it’s there. Like, I also have Batman Begins with a sort title of Dark Knight 1, which groups it with the other two when browsing.
What you can do for all the 007 movies is make it more of a “Harry Potter” style of naming. So you could rework the titles as something like:
James Bond: Dr. No
James Bond: Live and Let Die
James Bond: Octopussy
James Bond: Casino Royale
Then have the sort titles as: James Bond 1, James Bond 8, James Bond 13, James Bond 21. Just make sure you number them according to their actual release order in case you pick up a movie that you may have missed in the middle.
If you do not, as I do not, want to bother with the issue of looking up which movie is 1, 2, 3 or so on you can use the release year to get the sorting right:
“James Bond 1962” - for Dr. No
“James Bond 1964” - for Goldfinger
and so on (note: the release year is available right on the same page where you enter the sort field so no lookup involved.)
This also has the advantage of meaning that newly added movies get inserted in the sort order correctly. In the above if you buy “From Russia With Love” after you have set up the sort fields and enter the sort field as “James Bond 1963” then the new movie will appear in its correctly sorted position.
Should you have a collection where some of the movies are released in the same year you can extend the above with the month released. ie.:
“Bulldog Drummond 1937 01” - for Bulldog Drummond Escapes
“Bulldog Drummond 1937 09” - for Bulldog Drummond Comes Back
The other ways of using the sort field to keep thing organized are not wrong but I just find this way much more easy and intuitive.
For the James Bond films I created a dedicated section which just has those films in as there are 25 of them, lol
For the Star Trek films I add them to my movies section then edit the “Sort Title” to Star Trek 1 for the 1st film and so on, this is how I put all my film collections togeather in with all the other movies.
Its my server so I know that if I want to watch all the star treks I just need to goto Star Trek, same with the other films like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings etc etc
@sremick said:
How nice it’d be if Plex actually […] supported “collections”
Indeed. Anyways, I took a page out of @lr1950’s book and made “Favorite”, “Kids”, and “All” libraries for both Movies and for TV Shows. I created 4 sub-folders accordingly under each main file folder: Favorites, Kids, General, and Kids & Favorite. If someone was to make several sub-categories like this and have a movie appear in both (eg. “Kids & Favorites”), the folder creation (assuming they didn’t copy duplicate files to both folders instead of making a combined one) could become much more complicated very quickly, but I don’t have that problem (yet).
[EDIT:] Although, another option could be to create directory symlinks for each film, so the files could be in multiple places without taking up additional space… but I’m not sure if Plex uses symlinks properly. I remember once upon a time that it didn’t, but don’t know if they fixed that. [/EDIT]
So now my wife’s account, which sees the Favorite and Kids libraries, isn’t cluttered with movies she isn’t going to watch. And if I watch a movie or show often enough, I’ll move it into its respective Favorites.
