Looking for recommendations to organization/libraries in MultiUser environment

General Discussions
1

Hello, and thanks for at least skimming this over and especially if you can give any suggestions/ideas. Apologies for how this may kind of ‘bounce around’ and/or repeat some things.

Unnecessary stats:
Plex Server: 1.14.1.5488 running on macOS Mojave 10.14 (18A391)

Originally I was the only one using my Plex Server (it’s installed on a Mac and gets the media from a NAS), but around 6 months ago or so, I created 2 additional users to be able to see my media (1 is offsite). This all worked fine, but I noticed that the offsite user complained that in the Movie section there were a lot of foreign films or things that they are not interested in and would either open them by accident or they’d get mad at all the scrolling to get past them.

I started to look into having certain movies hidden from that user, but if I’m not mistaken, you can’t blacklist single movies and have to instead whitelist the ones they can see. If I’m right, it’s not feasible with the amount of shows and movies I have to do this and if I’m wrong, could someone explain a way to do it better? Although this may not have any effect in the end since I had a drive die in my NAS a little while back and I decided after replacing it I’d re-arrange my media to just keep those things from that user altogether.

The original setup had the NAS mounted onto the Mac like the following:

~/Kephale/environment/Media/Movies
~/Kephale/environment/Media/Music
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows

But since I had to reload all the data from scratch anyway, I changed it to something like the following (which I’m willing to change again if needed)

~/Kephale/environment/Media/Movies/Common
~/Kephale/environment/Media/Movies/Private
~/Kephale/environment/Media/Music
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Animated
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Common
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Private

Here’s the part I’d like advice on…
The three users need access to different combinations of the media and currently the only way I can think of doing it is having multiple libraries that have massive overlap and all these ‘duplicate’ libraries are visible to me (the admin account) and I want some of them hidden from me but shown to them if possible.
Ideally I want the following combinations:
User 1 (Me):

~/Kephale/environment/Media/Movies/Common
~/Kephale/environment/Media/Movies/Private
~/Kephale/environment/Media/Music
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Animated
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Common
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Private

User 2 (Onsite):

~/Kephale/environment/Media/Movies/Common
~/Kephale/environment/Media/Music
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Animated
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Common

User 3 (Offsite):

~/Kephale/environment/Media/Movies/Common
~/Kephale/environment/Media/TV Shows/Common

What I’ve done so far (and willing to redo/change if needed) is create two libraries for Movies and I’m ignoring the TV section until I figure this stuff out.
The ‘Movies’ library, contains just the ‘Movies/Common’ folder and is available to everyone and the second library I created was ‘a-Movies’ which has both the Common and Private folders together, which is available only to me. I had thought about doing the second library only containing the Private folder, but I want them merged for me instead of having to go back and forth while looking for stuff. So with this current setup, I see both ‘a-Movies’ and ‘Movies’ which is unwanted, but the other users only see ‘Movies’ with the correct content.

I assume this is not the ideal/smart way to do this and wanted to get some advice before I move onto TV shows and have to create even more redundant libraries that will show on my user and bug me to no end.

The largest pain is that there is so much content from each group that having to scan the same item multiple times takes forever. It took hours to scan the ‘Movies’ section (900 - 1000 movies) and the ‘a-Movies’ obviously took longer adding an additional 300-400 movies on top of that. Not to mention I just remembered I now have to go back through both libraries to edit some of the posters twice each. :frowning:

2

The problem in Plex is that any library you create is going to show up on the admin account like it or not. There is no “blacklisting” of tags and this has been asked for since the introduction of “whitelisting” which makes little sense compared to “blacklisting”.

What I’d do is create a “Foreign Movies” or “Movies - Foreign” library and put all of them in this library while keeping the “Movies” folder for your domestic movies.

What you want to do which is logical can’t be done in Plex. Everything mentioned can be done in the competitor product including hiding libraries from yourself in content view (not management/admin view).

In the competitor product everyone one of the folders you list could have separate sharing properties to them so you could pick and choose who has access to them all. They could be one large movies library or not but you control access for each “top” level path you add to a library. Everything you’re asking for and need to accomplish is a feature request here in the forums.

Once you get past basic library setup Plex sort of falls flat or advanced access control.

3

Thanks for the quick reply… I assumed I wouldn’t be able to hide the unwanted ones, that’s why I named the one ‘they’ can view as ‘Movies’ and mine as ‘a-Movies’ so it would at least show higher in the list and I can get to it quicker.

And based on the scanning speed, I think you’re right, naming the Foreign one and just keeping them separate since it’s currently day two since I started this and it’s still about 1/2 way through the combined version.

I’m not a fan doing it this way but I guess I’m stuck with it.

4

It kinds of sucks you need to jump through hoops to get the layout and library structure you want. I feel your pain as I’ve been dealing with this for years. Library management is 90% there but the last 10% missing causes a lot of grief as you are finding out.

The best recommendation I can give you is don’t sweat YOUR setup for those people you give FREE access to. Accommodate their needs if you can by separating foreign from domestic films (probably good for you too) but don’t worry the small stuff like they have to many listings to look through. :slight_smile:

There is always paid services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu they can pay and use which will have tons of stuff they aren’t interested in either and will be worse! :slight_smile:

Remember it’s your server and you want to keep it semi-fun to run and not make working on it a chore.

5

Very good point…

I just deleted the ‘a-Movies’ and created a ‘Movies 2’ that has just the foreign stuff, I’m not going to bother doing this crap with TV and just lump them all into the same library, they can deal with it. :slight_smile:

Side Note: I have it set up to use Collection data from TMDb, but is there a way to set the default to show the collection and hide the individual items? I know you can set it when creating the library, but I’ve forgotten more than once and have to change it and force refresh everything to get them to move in, which again, takes forever.

6

Yes, EDIT your library and you will see an option to do exactly what your asking for "hiding individual items). You need to set this on each library. You can change this at will and it doesn’t need to be set ONLY when setting up the library. It’s fine to change it at any time.

This option is on the ADVANCED TAB and is a drop down list box with choices.

7

Yeah, I knew where that was located. I just looked around the main settings to see if you could change the default for it to hide so you didn’t have to change it on every library.

8

Got ya. There is no “global” setting that I’m aware of, just individual library settings for this.

9

:frowning:

10

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