Scan Library Files within Show or Season not just main category.

Feature Suggestions
1

I find myself having to modify and/or replace certain episodes that either download or transcode incorrectly and i need to replace an episode or two. It would be handy and a lot less time consuming if i could rescan/refresh only a certain show or season of a show so that it wouldnt have to rescan my entire ever growing TV library.

2

You already can.
You can go into a show’s season or episode and ‘analyze’.
The option appear in the 3 dots “…” menu when in a show, or show’s season.
See more how/where here in the wiki.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200289336-Analyze-Media

3

@JamminR said:
You already can.
You can go into a show’s season or episode and ‘analyze’.
The option appear in the 3 dots “…” menu when in a show, or show’s season.
See more how/where here in the wiki.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200289336-Analyze-Media

Im not convinced this actually does that, i have sometimes tried to “analyze” a file that was showing as unavailable(after renaming the file) and the new file wasnt picked up until i scanned the library

4

This is not possible.
Plex doesn’t know into which show the new file belongs - until it has scanned it.
Catch22

5

@RyanDungeyMX - apologies - I thought those functions would scan.

@OttoKerner - I can’t agree it’s not possible. If the file is under a properly named folder structure as indicated in Plex media preparation articles,
TV library
–Show
—Season
—Ep file name.blah
then Plex should know that file belongs to that show. Perhaps Plex shouldn’t rely seasons as many just place S01E01, S02E02 in a single folder and Plex works, but definitely should know that show.

6

@JamminR said:
@RyanDungeyMX - apologies - I thought those functions would scan.

@OttoKerner - I can’t agree it’s not possible. If the file is under a properly named folder structure as indicated in Plex media preparation articles,
TV library
–Show
—Season
—Ep file name.blah
then Plex should know that file belongs to that show. Perhaps Plex shouldn’t rely seasons as many just place S01E01, S02E02 in a single folder and Plex works, but definitely should know that show.

But plex allows you to have files for a specific show in multiple locations.

For example, i might have season 1 of game of thrones in /D/TV/GoT/Season 1

But i might have season 2 in /E/TV/GoT/Season 2

If i replace a file in Season 2 folder, how will plex know which folder to scan for the change? Because GoT exists in 2 locations.

Plex only knows the location of individuel files, it does not know the location of seasons or shows themselves.

7

@RyanDungeyMX - In my theory, you’d still be following the Plex wiki guidelines for naming conventions. Your folder would be named ‘Game Of Thrones’ on both drives, not GoT. From that, I could imagine Plex recognizing show file changes under.
Again, it’s an idea, and will likely never be changed in Plex’s current scanning AI.

8

There should be an option to scan parent and sub folders under the show you are currently in. If it finds a file or files then match by name. Since Plex does not always detect a change to the folder structure. I then have to force a scan for the entire library, and then not only takes a long time due to being a horder, but this also puts unneeded network traffic, and disk useage on my systems.

9

Can you add a PMS feature that when you click on a show it gives you the option of re-scanning the files contained with-in that shows folder instead of scanning the entire library.

Something like this:

image
image961×520 109 KB

10

You can do this with the command line. I use the following as a post-download script in Sonarr to update just the series that changed. You can probably do the same thing in Windows (this is a Mac Bash script) and drag a folder onto the icon if you have it as a shortcut.

Incidentally, Refresh Metadata used to do this until a few years ago. At the time, this was discussed as a bug but was actually beneficial lol.

#! /bin/bash

seriespath="${sonarr_series_path}"
if [ -z "$seriespath" ];
then
	exit 0
else
	/Applications/Plex\ Media\ Server.app/Contents/MacOS/Plex\ Media\ Scanner --scan --refresh --section 4 --directory "$seriespath"
fi 
exit 0