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Keeping your content organized on Plex helps the built-in search functionality work smoothly. If you’re like me and you have a decent-sized media library, you’ll want to use one of these apps rather than doing all the legwork yourself. Trust me; it’s an absolute time saver!
Organizing Movies and TV Shows Within Plex
Plex allows customers to store their digital media collections on their servers, accessed through any compatible device. However, for this process to run smoothly, you mustpay attention to how you name your filesand the meta tags you use. According toPlex, as a minimum, movies and TV shows should be kept in separate files, but more specific grouping should be employed the larger your library becomes.
If you have a large digital media database, renaming, and tagging will become monotonous quickly, especially if you have multiple seasons of shows, special editions, trailers, or external media like subtitles or artwork. In this case, an organizational app will reduce some of the work and help streamline your collections.
For everything to run smoothly in Plex, all your movies and TV shows need to be named correctly, which can be particularly tricky when it comes to multiple seasons and episodes of series.FileBot can locate all your files relating to a specific titleand, at the click of a button, rename them so they are in the correct style structure for Plex.
FileBot has a few additional features, too. you’re able to download artwork and cover images, find the subtitles for any show or movie in most languages, and search IMDB for episode lists of your favorite shows. The only downside to FileBot is that it’s not free. Rather, you must pay a yearly subscription fee of $6 or purchase a lifetime license for $48.
Download:FileBot forWindows|Mac|Linux($48 lifetime, $6 yearly subscription available)
tinyMediaManager
tinyMediaManager is a great open-source alternative to FileBot, meaning it’s free! The software is written using Java, so it’s available on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It uses the same databases as FileBot, so it does a similar job of renaming your files and can provide you with subtitles and any related artwork.
Another useful feature of tinyMediaManager is its ability to extract some of the more technical data from your movie files, such as aspect ratio, bitrate, and resolution. Additionally, it can provide you with a list of available trailers for all your saved movies.
Download:tinyMediaManager forWindows|Mac|Linux(Free, subscription available)
Sonarr is a highly useful tool for downloading content from multiple sources. While its primary function is to monitorRSS feeds and download the latest episodes of your favorite TV shows, it can also scan your existing libraries and download missing episodes or automatically upgrade the format and quality of a file if a better option exists.
When you integrate Sonarr with Plex, you can take the automation one step further—it will convert the files to the correct filenames and meta tags so that all your downloads show up immediately on Plex.
Download:Sonarr forWindows|Mac|Linux(Free)
Rename My TV Series 2
Another popular choice is Rename My TV Series, which does exactly as it says on the tin. The 2.0 version has some notable upgrades and now uses the latest version of the TVDataBase API, meaning it works seamlessly with Plex.
Other improvements include a dark theme, notifications, the ability to merge two episodes into one file, and caching shows and banners for faster reload times.
Organizing your digital content can be a tedious job. However, with one of these handy apps, this can be done quickly and with minimal fuss, allowing you to get to the all-important task of watching it.
