How to make Plex completely ignore a certain folder?

General Discussions
1

First post on the forum, asking this in General because it could be solved both server and client side, but preferably done on the server.

The way I have my media organized is split into a movie folder, shows folder, and videos & specials folder. In this videos & specials folder I have movie extras, home videos and some series I have downloaded from YouTube.

I’m fine with splitting these three up into their own separate folders if that will help solve this problem.

The extras are organized in folders like so: /[movie name] ([year]) - Extras/[video files]

The issue is that Plex is cataloging/scanning this content, and seems to hide some of the content it cannot identify in the Plex Client.

Is there a way to make Plex not scan this folder at all, and display the file structure like in VLC? Right now it is split up into years, and these are often incorrect, it seems to be going off data modified/created, as opposed to the name of the folder that each video is in.

I know there’s a way you’re supposed to name extras, but I don’t want to look into a script to do that, or have to manually rename hundreds of these. And with the home videos and YouTube shows, I have the file tree organized very neatly and would like it if I could access a folder view of this content through Plex.

Thanks for any help.

2

Perhaps you can do what you want with .plexignore

3

Remove the videos and specials folder from your “movies” library.
Create a separate library of the type “Other Videos” and add the folder to it.

4

Sorry, the videos and specials are currently in an “other videos” type folder, separate from my movies.

5

In short: no. Plex will always scan the folder and try to deduct its metadata. This will fail often. The “folder” view mode that is available in Plex clients only comes after this step, so it is of limited use.

So if you want to do it “right”,

  • move the extras to their associated movies and rename them according to the Plex rules.
  • Separate out the web shows into their own library. If they are listed on TheTVDB, they will get better metadata and you can enjoy the logic that drives “episodic” content in Plex, like tracking which episode comes after which and tracking your progress through the series.
  • Keep the rest in your Other Videos library, but use the mp4 container for them. Which enables you to embed the correct metadata into the files themselves, like proper title, a longer description, or the date.
6

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