I’ve got about 200 videos that I’ve organized on my Snynology NAS into folders all against a single root that I’ve shared as a plex library. Unfortunately, they are all showing up in one flat list now, and even though each folder is alpha sorted, putting them all together creates a mess. That is, I have 20 episiodes in one session of a TV show, but now, they are scattered across my 200 list. I can’t easily rename them to start with the show name, then the episode number.
Any way to handle this and have each folder separate (without going and creating 25 separate libraries?
(FORGOT TO MENTION… I’m playing back mostly on a new LG TV with their built in plex client)
step 1: you’ll need to decide if you want to use Plex the “Plex way” (metadata based) or to stick by your folder organization.
If your 1st answer is to stick with the folders… ask yourself what they currently achieve for you. By experience, most of the use cases depending on folders can pretty easily achieved using Plex’ organization model too.
step 2: independent of #1, Plex doesn’t want you to mix tv shows and movies in the same library
That’s most likely what’s throwing your current approach off the rails. No need to have 25 libraries – probably just 1 for movies and 1 for tv-shows (unless you want to e.g. distinguish between “regular” movies/tv-shows and anime or movies and shorts).
Side note… if the effort of re-naming the files is what worries you. There’s apps that can help with that (e.g. FileBot – or even the native Finder if you’re on macOS).
Edit: if you want to stick with your folder based approach – just switch the Plex client to show the library By Folders – that should achieve what you’re asking for.
