Huge size of PhotoTranscoder folder

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.20.1.3252

Hi!
My Plex is running on multi-disk Mac server and all of media content is located on large non-system volumes.
Nevertheless, Plex server app and its caches are located on system volume by default.
My system volume is SSD and not too big to carry on tens GB of PhotoTranscoder cache (over 55GB at the moment), so I wonder how I can re-map cache location?
I’ve found legal solution to re-map Transcode cache and backups location, but no significant info about PhotoTranscoder cache at all… No settings to clean/optimize/relocate etc. this cache in Plex Web settings, no hidden parameters for PhotoTranscoder in com.plexapp.plexmediaserver.plist…

Does anybody knows how to manage this issue?

2

For a few years now I have been regularly (at least 1 a week via a cron job) deleting the contents of this folder (along with a few others) after I noticed my own growing to 100s of GB in size.

Its a cache and thus garbage that plex hangs onto and never cleans up.

1 Like
3

You are right and this is a question why Plex has no user tools or settings to (auto)clean it. 10s and 100s of GB is too much to ignore, especially on SSD.

At the same time - it is a cache … targeted to improve performance of Plex. If I clean it - it slows down (in theory) visualization due to the metadata downloading jobs…
Actually I’m ready to cut enough space for it but not on SSD. So I’m looking for the relocation and remapping solution…

4

I think I found a bug, at least on some platforms (Windows should be unaffected). We should be clearing cache files older than 30 days every week with a scheduled task but I just ran this job on my own system and it’s not doing what I would expect it to.

I have a fix in the works.

7 Likes
5

Good news! Should we wait this fix in close updates?

6

Glad to here there’s a fix coming. I just caught this today and my phototranscoder folder is at about 170GB on my Mac.

3 Likes
7

Yikes! The next beta release which has a fix for this is currently with our QA team so it should hopefully be ready sometime next week.

It is perfectly safe to manually delete the contents of the PhotoTranscoder folder though if you need to reclaim the space urgently.

4 Likes
8

PMS Version 1.20.1.3252
Win 10

Add me to the list of PhotoTranscoder gone wild. I didn’t notice it last week when Windows was running out of space, but today it’s showing a folder size of 183GB.

I’ve noticed Plex is always scanning my photo library, even though there are no changes (since Camera Upload has also been broken for me for a long time). In a previous help request, a ninja noted it’s unusual activity in my log files.

I’ll delete the folder contents of the Phototranscoder cache for now. Please update when you can. Thanks.

9

The scheduled clean up job should now work correctly in the latest beta.

1 Like
10

I’m currently on version 1.20.3.3483, and my PhotoTranscoder folder is still over 42gb. Is there something i should be doing to get this to clean up?

Edit… with a random spot check in the folders, it looks like everything has a modified date of less than 30 days. I have about 2600 movies and 4000 TV episodes. This doesn’t seem like too much, compared to other libraries on here.

11

Mine is 248GB on a 500GB boot drive. I’ve already deleted it once, and it just regrew. Please advise on how to stop this from happening!!

12

I’m on 1.20.4.3517 and this is a recurring problem for me too.

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1 Like
13

So can we just delete the content in that folder? How quickly does it grow back?

14

Yes, you can delete it, or at least my Server didn’t seem to care that I deleted it. I cleared mine about 2 weeks ago. It’s now back to 113 GB… So I guess once a month will do it.

15

Cool… i’ll delete. It’s the only way i can update to Big Sur. Otherwise i do not have enough HD space.

If anyone from Plex is reading this, we need the ability to set custom locations for these caches. The current setup doesn’t work for people with really large libraries, and small OS drives.

16

I would like to either be able to easily designate the cache location or just limit its size (or both).

17

I’m currently on Version 1.20.5.3600 and have run into this issue on CentOS 7.

18

The size of this folder is really very dependent on how active a server is and by default we’ll remove any cache files older than 30 days during the Scheduled Tasks window.

You can check for the oldest files in this folder to confirm that the cleanup job is working correctly by navigating to the Phototranscoder folder (in my case it’s /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache/PhotoTranscoder) and running something like this:

find . -type f -name '*.jpg'|xargs stat -c '%y'|sort|more

You’ll get back a paged list of the files sorted by date:

2020-10-13 03:13:21.758539230 +0200
2020-10-13 03:13:21.778539199 +0200
2020-10-13 10:25:05.577137622 +0200
2020-10-13 10:25:05.585137600 +0200
2020-10-13 13:48:34.151784300 +0200
2020-10-13 14:08:58.056779108 +0200
2020-10-13 14:08:58.216778725 +0200
...
...

In my case this seems to be working as expected as I’m not seeing any files older than ~30 days (given that the job runs weekly).

19

Mine is cleaning up correctly after 30 days but is still over 300GB… is there no way to disable this?

20

300GB seems a tad excessive :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Do you have a lot of shared users? I’m wondering why that folder would get so big. Mine is only around 9GB.

Disabling it isn’t possible but would result in a worse experience when browsing content, especially if there are quite a few users accessing the server. I could look into making the expiration time configurable so you can make this clear out weekly instead - I’ll see what I can do.