I have created a TV Show library (named Movie Collections) as a workaround for the incomplete implementation of movie collections in Plex. Each “show” is a movie collection and the “episodes” are the movies in that collection. To avoid duplicating the files I am using symbolic links so, for example, I would have a symbolic link like this:
/MovieCollections/Collection Name/Collection Name.S01e01.Movie Name.mp4 => /Movies/Movie Name.mp4
I have a script which creates all these links based on the collections in the Plex database.
This works fine when a movie only exists in one collection, but this appears to break if it is in more than one collection. For example, I have one collection for Marvel movies and one for Iron Man movies with the Iron Man movies so I have:
/MovieCollections/Marvel/Marvel.S01e01.Iron Man.mkv => /Movies/Iron Man.mkv
/MovieCollections/Iron Man/Iron Man.S01e01.Iron Man.mkv => /Movies/Iron Man.mkv
Because the two symbolic links point to the same file, Plex will only include it in one of the shows (presumably the one which gets scanned first). Although the filenames show in Plex as the symbolic link filenames and not the original files (and also show that way in the database) it appears that Plex recognises that they are the same file and so only includes it once.
Is there a way around this other than duplicating the file instead of using a symbolic link?
Found a way but dont think it will work for more than the original and 2 links.
1 - move the movie to one of the collection folder: /MovieCollections/Marvel/Marvel.S01e01.Iron Man.mkv
2 - make the links to the other folders
/MovieCollections/Iron Man/Iron Man.S01e01.Iron Man.mkv => /MovieCollections/Marvel/Marvel.S01e01.Iron Man.mkv
/Movies/Iron Man.mkv => /MovieCollections/Marvel/Marvel.S01e01.Iron Man.mkv
3- on the collection library you will get one icon with 2 versions. Just split the file.
Seems the problem is that Plex treats the links as the same thing. I tried making a soft and a hard link, a link of the link, etc. The only way it worked is having the movie and a link on the same library. So if you add a /MovieCollections/Avengers/Avengers So1E01 Iron Man.mkv => ?? i dont find a way to make it work.
Could you not accomplish the results you wanted by making a playlist? Since the playlists are managed by Plex proper, they’d use the database IDs and could find the movies where ever they existed, and would also follow the movie even if the literal file was changed (like if you went from 720 to 1080 to 4k.)
At least that’s the way I did my Marvel movie collection.
I’d be interested to know if there was something about doing this your way that provides some advantage.
I’d love to find out about this to clean up my libraries. Right now . I have all our movies in a movies folder, and a subfolder kids that has the kids library which works fine, plus I have some ratings filters on there. However, some of the movies that sneak into PG are basically insane. To give me some granularity for libraries I’d love to make some internal family ratings, or tags and then give my kids access to the movies based on our criteria.
For example I’d take some sexy stuff and extreme violence out of our “own” pg rating, and then soft link appropriate movies into the pg folder, or each childs folder etc… without havving to duplicate files allover the place.
I haven’t tried this yet, so any advice on how to best organize this for multiple kids would be greatly appreciated.
