.plexignore

Plex Media Server
1

It seems to me that the feature .plexignore and its formatting is one of the more elusive in all my google searches. I don’t understand its capability at all.

Does it only support plain keywords or does it support regex pattern matching?

An example. Does .plexignore support filtering of any files smaller than 300MB even if it doesn’t have “sample” in its name? This comes up due to my laziness. I store all files I download in one big 45TB directory. It would be too much work for me to separate these files now. These files include music, TV Shows and learning files too. So when I want to just include movies I can do this easily if .plexignore supports the filtering of any file that is less than a certain size.

2

No, .plexignore files only do filename matching.

3

Here is a pretty clear description of what you can do with .plexignore:

Aside from that, you’re going to have major headaches caused by having everything in one flat folder. Music albums won’t be cataloged accurately, and having movies and TV shows in the same folder will cause unexpected behavior. Plex’s documentation warns of this in no uncertain terms.

4

Thank you for both your replies. Seems like an underwhelmed feature since we already know that there is provisioning for filtering of sample files less than 300MB in size.

5

You could just move files smaller than a certain threshold out of the directory entirely, pretty easily. In the terminal, from the directory where the files live:

find ./ -type f -size -300M mv {} /directory/for/small/files/ \;

Or, if you only wanted to move your small .mkv files from the directory:

find ./ -type f -size -300M -name "*.mkv" mv {} /directory/for/small/files/ \;

You could adjust the size and name parameters to match your needs.

Make a new root path for this. For example, if your current path to the files is /unorganized/files/, make the new path /organized/files/smallmovies/

6

I read an article a few years ago about “download addiction” … :stuck_out_tongue:

I understand not wanting to go through ALL of your downloads.

Perhaps it would be easier to “lift” the movies out of it?

(Hah! That’s funny, almost exactly the same thing @pshanew was typing. But I’m suggesting to do it in reverse. Move the big ones, that are “movie” types.)

Edit:
I use Radarr with hard links.
I keep my source files in the original download directories.
I let Radarr build hard links into the directories that Plex scans.
They don’t take up extra space. And I can delete them from the Plex-watched directories OR the download directories without impacting the other. Or rename them!

I wonder if a similar strategy would work for you, too - whether you use a tool (Radarr, similar) or just build hard links yourself.

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7

Now that you mention it, I like that idea much better. Something like:
find ./ -type f -size +300M -name "*.mkv" mv {} /media/video/ \;

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8

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