Symlinks not working in Windows 10 Plex server

[okarcheboy]

Plex Version 1.19.1.2645

Host Windows 10
NAS Seagate (Windows 2012R2)

Working from home I finally have the opportunity to try and organize my video collection.

I have my plex server running on my home windows 10 desktop (more horsepower for transcodeing) with all of my files on a 12tb Seagate NAS. When I add a library I do so using a unc path (\seagate-wss-nas\ServerFolders…) instead of using a mapped drive and overall this works great.

I have a large number of videos that I want to categorize in folders according to subject matter. Many of these videos will appear in multiple folders. I store all the videos in a root directory on the Seagate NAS server and create sub directories for each category populated with symbolic links pointing back to the parent (target) file in the root directory (some with relative paths, some with absolute paths for testing).

From my Windows 10 desktop that runs my plex server I can open file manager and navigate to the parent directory and open any of the files in the root directory and those symlinked from the sub directories. So I know the symlinks are good from an OS perspective.

However, when I add a new Library pointing to this structure the only files pulled in are those in the root directory.

Any Ideas?

[Mangatz]

I had the same problem i was trying to symlink files, and plex wouldnt recognize them. through trial and error i found that symlinking the entire folder the file was in worked for me.

example. file1 is in folder1 you want it to be in folder2 and folder3 as well, for plex to recognize it I had to put a symlink pointing to folder 1 in folder2.
so in folder 2 and 3 it would look like [Folder2>Folder1(symlink)>file1] and for [Folder3>Folder1(symlink)>file1]
i used link shell extension to create the links

it would be a bit of a hassle to put a bunch of files in individual folders but at least for me that’s the only way i could get it working.

Hopefully that helps a bit!