Most efficient way of organizing media

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Could someone recommend what is the most efficient way of organizing media? I have tons of movies in the Movie Library folder. So they are all sitting in that one folder. I don’t suppose that is the most efficient way to put files on a hard drive (NAS drive in my case). Ideally the faster searches would be if you have better organized folder instead of one jumbo folder. At the same time, I don’t want to create one folder per movie because then that would be equal to hundreds of folders under one giant “main” folder. Not sure how efficient would that be. Any other suggestions except creating category folders like Action, War, Comedy, etc. Just don’t want to do that because Plex already does that for us. Another option I read was to go by years. e.g. Before 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, etc. And then put movies which released in those years under those folders. I think that is the most favorable option I have seen so far.

Any other suggestions?

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I can’t handle more than 100-150 movies in a single library due to the horizontal scrolling in the various new apps. It’s also a good idea to run smaller libraries because as you mention items load faster and new items are indexed faster. A folder for every movie is simply a pain in the a$$ - so that’s right out. Movies with extras are placed in folders as recommended.

I do exactly as you suggest and here is the run down of my library structure:
1940s
1950s
1960s - 1970s
1980s - 1990s
2000 - 2009
Bond, James Bond
Classics
Documentaries
Gangstas
MCEB - Movies (where MCEBuddy places recorded movies from TV)
Mo-Movies (recent movies from 2010 - I may not live long enough to add another decade to the library - here’s hoping)
Music - Blues
Music - Rock
Music - Smooth Jazz
Sci-Fi Movies
Sci-Fi Sets (Aliens, Predators, Star Treks, Star Wars, etc)
Sci-Fi Vintage (precious commodity - A, B, C -Grade Sci-Fi, late 50s and 60s - the only library I backup or really care about)
TV - MCEB (where MCEBuddy names and places recorded TV Shows into the proper directory structure - and where I place watch/delete content)
TV - Sci-Fi (TNG, DS9, SG-1, etc)
TV - Shows (keepers)
TV - Vintage (Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, etc)
War
Westerns

Seems like a lot of libraries, and it may be, but it allows me to browse and find things without too much of the painful itch and swelling associated with horizontal scrolling and also allows libraries to be scattered across 5 hard drives… as more space is needed it’s a simple matter to move one or more libraries to new drives without too much fuss.

The possibilities are virtually endless, but the above works well for me.

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Inside Plex, I keep all films in one Library.

Storage wise, each film is in a separate folder, which is then inside a folder for the first letter of the film.
This is just to make it easier to find when I access the media outside of plex.

/Movies/
   /0-9
   /A
      /The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975)
         /The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) - 1080p - G.mkv
   /B
   /C
   /and so on...
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I keep it pretty simple as I have 20 Tb of content…

All my content is on a NAS with the exception of TV Shows still in production and is currently sitting in a USB Drive.

The NAS has one Media Volume I have mapped to drive M:
Inside that Share are the following folders:
Cartoons - For Animated TV Series - One Sub folder for each Series with an Extras folder (where applicable) for each show. This has it’s own section in Plex.
Cooking - For Cooking TV Shows - One Sub folder for each Series with an Extras folder (where applicable) for each show. This has it’s own section in Plex.
Collections - For Movie Collections like Star Wars and James Bond - One Sub folder for each Collection Set, One folder for each Movie in that collection with an Extras folder where Applicable.
Movies - For one off Movies (moved to collections when needed) - One Sub folder for each Movie with an Extras folder (where applicable) for each Movie. Movies section includes both Collections and Movies.
TV Shows - For TV Shows - One Sub folder for each Series with an Extras folder (where applicable) for each show. TV Show section includes TV Shows and the folder from the USB Drive that has the in production shows stored.

Note: My use of the Extras folder in Movies, Collections and TV Shows is not supported by Plex. In Plex you must use naming conventions to identify and catalog Extras properly. I hope one day Plex will recognize the Extras folder and catalog the contents accordingly regardless of how they are named.

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Thanks All for wonderful responses.

AsphyxNYC, I have a similar structure. Collections are fine but Movies folder is the one that is quite large. Short of creating one folder per movie, I was trying to see if there is another organizing structure that could help.

Hthighway, is there any windows software that you know of that could do this work? Or maybe a cmd script?

I could potentially go with the years folders like JiceWsa has done (and maybe that is my best choice). Unless I can find an automatic way of doing this.

I guess what I am looking for is an automatic program or script that could create folder for each movie and then move the file in it.

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@Canbonbon said:
Could someone recommend what is the most efficient way of organizing media? I have tons of movies in the Movie Library folder. So they are all sitting in that one folder. I don’t suppose that is the most efficient way to put files on a hard drive (NAS drive in my case). Ideally the faster searches would be if you have better organized folder instead of one jumbo folder. At the same time, I don’t want to create one folder per movie because then that would be equal to hundreds of folders under one giant “main” folder. Not sure how efficient would that be. Any other suggestions except creating category folders like Action, War, Comedy, etc. Just don’t want to do that because Plex already does that for us. Another option I read was to go by years. e.g. Before 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, etc. And then put movies which released in those years under those folders. I think that is the most favorable option I have seen so far.

Any other suggestions?

Here’s a couple pics from my setup that might give you some ideas? The search function of PLM allows for searches by dates, res, genre, etc.. So why store them in folders by date?

319×793 56.9 KB

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@Canbonbon said:
Hthighway, is there any windows software that you know of that could do this work? Or maybe a cmd script?

Take a look at filebot

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I have more or less the same amount of content as you and have my media organized in the same way. My Plex server (14 core xenon) has no issues with the structure or number of files, but I’m starting to wonder if it would be beneficial to organize my Movies folder into one parent folder (Movies), then child folders of A, B, C…

Movies
A
B
C
…
Z

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If you have a very high number of movies, this is a viable option. And I still recommend the ‘one folder per movie’ approach, unless you have no external subtitles, no posters nor any other local extras for that movie.

Keep in mind that you cannot use the same approach with TV series. It would interfere severely with the matching process.

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I use Sonarr and Radarr to both pull my Movies\TV Series and also to manage the filesystem.

I just use one ‘Movies’ Library, and another ‘TV’ Library

For the directory structure, it’s a simple:

movie > movieName > File(s)

tv > seriesName > seasonXX > File(s)

It’s also worth noting that you can use both Sonarr & Radarr to organise your media for you by defining how you want the directory and filenames.

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what is the logic behind nesting a single movie in a folder? sounds like it would double the number of objects plex would have to traverse/manage.

just so i’m clear, you are suggesting a structure like this:

movies
…movie_a (folder)
…movie_a (file)

the path would end up as movies\movie_a\movie_a.mkv

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As I said: if you only have one single file (i.e. the actual video file) but no other files around it (poster, subtitles, other things) then you can probably go with your current approach. But you may have to disable the Local Media Assets agent.
Otherwise you will get delays upon entering the preplay pages of all movies which share a common folder.

If every movie has its own subfolder, this delay will be much, much shorter (and probably not noticable anymore).

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I use FileBot and TV Rename to do a bulk of my organization.

I have my many many drives with lots of storage(sadly running low on some of them), Filebot is setup to scan all the drives to see which has the most space and puts whatever movies I’m scraping into those. It does this each time so they’re spread out evenly, saving me the headache of having to do it.

After this, it scans the file and finds the resolution in standard terms(240p, 720p, 1080p, 4k and everything in between) and separates them inside the drives based on their resolution. So all the same resolution movies are in a directory together. From there, it then pulls the genre of the movie if it has one and puts it into another directory based off of that(Horror, Action, Romance, etc.).

After this it creates a folder with the Name, year, edition(unrated, directors cut), resolution and then what type of Audio it uses(DTS, AAC, AC3). Then it places any files that it tags with it, most of the time it’s just subtitles and names it in a similar fashion(Name, Year and then adds how it’s encoded). Soon after that Plex will usually get triggered and add it to the database.

I use Radarr and Sonarr to find stuff, but sadly it doesn’t support this type of file structures so I can’t use it to its full advantages.

TV Shows are a different beast entirely, I can use Sonarr with my file structures as they’re more basic. TV Rename sorts all of my TV shows and updates them any time I open the app and places them into an ENDED and ONGOING folder and sorts them by TV Show>Season>Filenames.

It works well so far, I’d love a more automated way of doing things but haven’t found anything that works as of yet.

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