Move Video Thumbnails from Windows to Mac?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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1

Promise I googled this, searched Reddit and this forum :frowning: But I guess not good enough.

but if I’m migrating from Windows to Mac (fresh server/install, no migration/copy of any kind)… can I simply copy and paste the video thumbnail folder from the Windows (old server) to my Mac (new server)? And it’ll magically match the video thumbnails knowing what movies they are for?

Or are the video thumbnails more tied to filepaths and so if my old server had 1,000 movies on E:\ and F:\ and now the Mac’s folders are \drive1\ and \drive2\ it won’t be able to tie/sync everything together?

Not sure if that makes sense. Again, brand new Plex Server, starting from scratch, not keeping any watch history, or anything from the old server… but hoping to at least keep the video thumbnails (save movies, but different paths now). I’ve got a massive video thumbnail folder I’d hate to re-create

2

Sad to tell you it doesn’t :upside_down_face:
Cross-platform migrations are tricky but possible. Simply placing select files of your old setup into the new one is set to fail (how should your server even know to what items those files relate?).

3

They’re tied to the media entries in the database, which have references to the files.

If you have the old database file you could parse it, adjust the media paths that have changed, and copy the VPT files from the old paths to the new paths. But I don’t think that seems worthwhile.

@stevezau just did a neat thing to generate VPT files outside of Plex, and faster too. (There would be some complexity on Mac with the script’s current use of docker but that could be fixed.)