I would really appreciate that adding and managing media in your library would be less restricted and more free and customizable.
While the auto scanner can be handy and saving tons of time, it is also pretty restrictive and there are a lot of ways, where it can cause problems. I’ve browsed through the suggestion section of the forum for about a hour now and a good chunk of library managing problems would be solved if there was a way to manage your library more freely.
Here are my ideas in detail:
Add an option to manually add media files aside from the auto-scanning. Something like “right click” -“add new tv show/movie/ect” and a blank entry appears named “new”. Then you can edit it as you like, similar to how you already can edit entries now. In the lower part, you can add “seasons” and name them as you wish. The design would be exactly like seasons are handled right now, so you can set up a cover for them and everything. And in those “seasons”, you can add media files simply by providing a file or folder location on your hard drive. It will just directly add all the media without scanning names or anything. After importing one or multiple files, you can rename them in plex without changing the actual file name, like you can already do it now. Also, you would be able to manually change the order of all “seasons” and files simply by drag and drop. Add a new “custom” option when changeing the sorting order, so it remembers your order and you can switch back to it in case you like to sort it by something else inbetween.
Here is a small screenshot gallery, so you can see how these features could look like:
Click me!
This would people give the advantages of:
- Not being forced to reorganize and rename potentially several thousands of files to match the scanners indexing system just to be able to use plex.
- Being able to manage their collection in their own way, like franchise based or publisher based.
- Being able to manually add media files, the scanner missed for some reason.
- Being able to add things, that are not traditional movies or tv episodes, like music videos, extras and such without inconvieniently having to work around that with that “season 0” thing. Also, you would be able to put specials or mid-season extras at the right spots instead of them always appearing first.
I think adding this wouldn’t be too complex as most of the features are already implemented, but in a more restrictive way.
This would let people not only correct and optimize the scanner-imported data much better and easier, it also opens up the possibility to create and organize truly unique and personalized libraries.
