It would be nice if Plex had the option to store the generated media thumbnails with the media possibly in a subfolder. Personally, for me it would be nice, because I run unraid, and Plex lives on my cache drive which is an SSD. Mainly due to preview thumbnails my Plex install has ballooned to 120GB. It would be nice to get back the vast majority of that space on my SSD.
It would also help if I ever had to restore my plex installation, because the preview thumbnails would be seperate, and my backups of plex could be smaller.
I would really like to see this or something similar, but for different reasons than the OP listed. I have a very large library and previously, when I had my whole Plex installation on a 500GB SSD, things were great and, importantly, navigating menus in clients was fairly zippy. Then the size of video preview thumbs (which I like and don’t want to turn off) filled the SSD and necessitated moving all of Plex’s AppData to an external HD. This works, but resulted in significantly slower menu loading/navigation in clients, presumably because all that info went from a fast SSD to a much slower HD connected externally (in this case via USB 2.0 which my dedicated Plex server laptop has).
According to @OttoKerner there is unfortunately no way to only move the video previews to a different folder/drive because they are not separated by folder but sit inside the metadata ‘bundle’ of each individual video item.
I wish this could be changed so everything necessary for menu loading and navigation could stay on the fast SSD’s, and space consuming video previews could load off the slower and bigger HD’s when a video is selected to be played. It would mean people who pay for a Plex Pass in part for the video previews feature wouldn’t have to suffer slow menu loading or keep shelling out for bigger and bigger expensive SSD’s as our libraries grow. The easier backup/restore possibilities OP mentioned would be a nice bonus too.
I’ve been thinking more about this and because there is no way to only move the video previews to a different folder/drive because they are not separated by folder, but sit inside the metadata ‘bundle’ of each individual video item, I fear Plex devs may consider this too big of a change under the hood to actually implement. So I had an idea that would not require this but would still satisfy most of my desires in the above post, however not necessarily the desires of the OP’s post, so I decided I needed to post it in it’s own thread.
The idea is a setting to allow the video preview files to be auto-deleted after they reach a certain age so as to help limit the space they take up. I hope this would be significantly easier to implement. Here’s the thread for that if anyone reading this is interested in supporting it:
I’d like a UI option to specify a folder to store them in (same as the backup location option in the scheduled tasks settings). In my case, the media folders are read-only for Plex, and I don’t want to store the .bif files with the media because they’re meaningless except for Plex. But I want my Plex installation to stay lean and I want to move the thumbnails to cheaper storage.
I built a new server, and now have the horsepower and space to generate video preview thumbnails… when I discovered this limitation, so I’ve added my vote. In my case I want to store thumbnails on my media drive, which is an HDD with lots of space, not on my SSD which has has enough space now for thumbnails, but won’t as my library continues to grow.
I know I can do a sym link (Linux) and move the entire Plex data folder, but I don’t want to lose the speed of the SDD for the entire Plex instance. (I found a post where someone had done just this, but their plex interface response time was slower with all Plex data on the HDD.)
I agree 100% with the original post, for the same reasons.
My server is an Intel NUC, it has a 256GB SSD drive, all my media sits on a NAS box (4x 4TB drives) which has lots of spare space so being able to host all the metadata with the library makes a lot of sense.
Upvoting this item. This would be awesome! Please do this.
Almost 9,000 people have viewed the instructions on manually doing this with SymLinks on Windows alone. That is a big audience.
Yeah please.
I am using the following system setup:
Plex Media Server on NVIDIA Shield, File Location on Synology NAS via Share
But there is no possible to change via setting the location of the thumbnails …, so I have do deactivate them while having more then 5 TB free on NAS to do so …
Being able to place thumbnails on another data partition or separate HDD, while keeping all the other metadata alongside the rest of PMS, would be really nice.
I have a very large library and have had to disable thumbnails in some of my libraries.
I’d like to note that I would like the video preview thumbnails and the metadata used in menus be separated. I run a similar setup to others who have posted and have run into the same issue.
