Plex magically scans and organizes your files, automatically sorting your media beautifully and intuitively in your Plex library
That’s fine if your files and folders are named according to the plex standard, but this may not be the case. For example:
A user has painstakingly created her own preferred file naming convention and either doesn’t want to change it or doesn’t want to make the effort to change it.
A user is creating a library referencing a network volume he doesn’t own, eg. sharing collections in a dorm environment.
Probably various other scenarios I’m not thinking of a the moment.
It should be possible to suppress the magical scanning and organizing on a library by library basis; showing just the folder structure and contained files exactly as they are on the disk or network volume. This might go against the ‘magical scanning’ philosophy of Plex’s architecture, but it would surely make life easier for users like this one.
The best you can do is use the Other Videos library type is sort of. It will only get metadata embedded in your files. Plex is not designed or meant to behave like a file browser and likely never will be. Though I have been wrong before
You can still name the library Movies or whatever. It will not have things that caters to Movies or TV formatting as it is mostly for Home Videos.
Actually, selecting Other Videos worked quite well. Except that I can navigate down the tree, but I haven’t figure out how to navigate up the tree, except for going back to the top and working my way down again. The usual suspects like mouse clicks, escape, arrow keys, etc., don’t seem to do it, and nothing in the ? keyboard shortcut crib sheet seemed like I was looking for. Is there a way to do this?
I realize that I’m not doing things the way Plex intends, so I may need to work with some limitations.
