I don't understand how to use Managed Users

General Discussions Plex Features
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As the title suggests, I am having trouble getting anything useful out of the Managed Users feature. If someone can help me that would be awesome - apologies if I have missed something obvious :slight_smile:

So - I have created a secondary User, in order to share my Plex interface with a friend whowill get good use out of this while recovering from a procedure. I have paid for a Plex Pass if that matters. The security angle - pretty normal, I would just like to share the video files but not the photos and personal videos.

Where I am puzzled - is at what point anyone is meant to be prompted to choose a profile? I have added PIN numbers but I never get prompted unless I manually switch profiles.

For example, my primary use-case: when logging in from an internet location (anywhere other than my LAN) I get the ā€œPlex Web would like to sign in to your Plex accountā€ prompt. It seems I have two options at this juncture:

  1. Sign in with my primary account - which goes straight into my own profile, no prompt for PIN. No potential to utilise the extra account at all - I want any potential user to have to enter a PIN, isnā€™t that how security works!?
  2. Sign into Plex with anything else - another Gmail account, a Facebook account - and I get a blank interface that fails to find any servers. So this is even less useful than option 1.

It just seems so weird to me, that I cannot make any sense of this feature. I must be missing something super simple, so simple that they never bothered mentioning the mechanics in any articles :smiley:

Thanks in advance
Matt

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Hi there, my setup I have my primary user with a pin, and about 8 other users without pins (these users canā€™t delete stuff off of my server, but can only read) then I have several with their own plex account and sharing my library. Back to your issue, edit the user, click on your server name under ā€œmy serverā€ on the left side, you should see a box checked ā€œAll Librariesā€ under shared, uncheck that and then choose the specific libraries you want to share with that user.

This requires you to authorize whatever device they are going to use to access your server, at which point they will see a login screen and pick a user to open that shared library. When you log in there is an option to always use this user and auto logs you into that account.

Now, the other way is to share your library with friends who have a plex account (They donā€™t need to have a plex pass, just a plex account for you to share with them), this way does not require you to authorize any devices for that user as they will sign in with their plex account using whatever device they want, and just access the shared library.

EDIT: Another breakdown is:
ā€œUsersā€ are for family/local people allowing your to authorize the devices so they can use the libraries.
ā€œFriendsā€ are for others outside your network of family that you want to share your media with but not really control the devices they use. This is where you use the options to limit how many devices they can use to access your server (at the same time).

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If you are doing this for a friend that you do not control the device, you do not want a Managed User. This is more for kids since you need to log into the device with your Admin account and then use fast user switching to get to the other account.

You want to have them create their own Plex.tv account and share to that. This can be added as a member of your Plex Home just like a Managed user can be, but is not necessary. You should check out some of the Support Documents for sharing, particularly the Create a New Share one which should walk you through creating a share to an external user.

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Great info, thanks! Apologies for the delay in acknowledging your comment, I was heavily sidetrackedā€¦

This is great - I have a much better understanding. I also have an embarrassing admission to make - when first playing with the App, I had set the local subnet (/24) to be exempt from authentication, and forgot all about it :blush: That explained why some machines were not prompting me for a PIN.

The internet-based (or non-local) friends require a separate Plex account, and I should share my library with them as ā€˜friendsā€™ - gotcha!

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Yes thank you - you are of course completely correct, I will share to their email address and let them sort themselves out with a Plex account :smiley: