Organizing family videos for easy time-based search

General Discussions
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I have lots of family videos that go all the way down to 2003. They are organized as follows: a top level folder named Family, and then subfolders, one per year. Within each of these, there are subfolders for the different months, each of these folders containing the actual videos. The reason for this organization should be pretty obvious. Now Plex does not seem to play well with this. It seems to rely on the names of the different video files, which makes it looking for videos on a time basis a nightmare, or well-nigh impossible - numerous videos have the same, nondescript names.

What naming mechanism would enable Plex to facilitate searching these videos on a time basis? I guess one could resort to renaming every file so that it contains year and month information - but that looks very clunky and impractical. I am guessing that there are better ways to accomplish this in Plex. Any suggestions on how to reorganize these video files, with the goal above in mind?

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When I did this same thing (with family videos going back to the 60’s), I placed them in a TV library so that I could follow the Show/Season/Episode format. That meant, for me, that I did it by Family/Year/Event Video. You could do Year/Month/Event. If you name the files with descriptive names and use the Local Media agent, it should name them within the UI with the name of the file.
Since I did this, collections have been implemented. Now, you could create a Movie or Personal Video library and put each of the files in collections that would make finding your videos easier.

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Thanks for your feedback.

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