Plex Naming Convention: The Complete Guide for Movies and TV Shows

Plex identifies your media almost entirely from file and folder names. Get the convention right and Plex fills in posters, summaries, and cast automatically. Get it wrong and you spend evenings fixing matches by hand. This is the complete naming convention, including the advanced overrides most guides skip.

Start with separate library folders

Keep each library type in its own root folder, and never mix them:

Media/
  Movies/
  TV Shows/

Pointing one Plex library at a folder containing both is one of the most common causes of bad matches.

Movies

One movie per folder. Put the release year in parentheses, and match the folder name to the file name:

Movies/
  Batman Begins (2005)/
    Batman Begins (2005).mkv

The year is the single most important part. Without it, remakes and same-titled films collide — Plex has no way to tell 1994's title from 2014's.

Multiple editions of the same movie

Plex supports an edition tag in curly braces, which keeps cuts separate instead of merging them:

Movies/
  Blade Runner (1982)/
    Blade Runner (1982) {edition-Theatrical Cut}.mkv
    Blade Runner (1982) {edition-Final Cut}.mkv

TV shows

Three levels: series folder, season folder, then episodes with SxxExx:

TV Shows/
  Band of Brothers (2001)/
    Season 01/
      Band of Brothers (2001) - s01e01 - Currahee.mkv

Rules that matter:

• Zero-pad season and episode numbers — s01e01, not s1e1.
• Put specials in Season 00.
• Multi-episode files use a range: s01e01-e02.
• Keep the series year in the folder name to separate reboots from originals.

The override most people miss: provider IDs in the filename

If a title still matches wrong, you can force it. Plex accepts a provider ID in curly braces, which overrides its own guess:

Movies/
  Batman Begins (2005) {imdb-tt0372784}/
    Batman Begins (2005) {imdb-tt0372784}.mkv

Supported forms include {imdb-tt0372784}, {tmdb-272}, and {tvdb-123456}. The tt prefix on IMDb IDs is optional. For TV, you can put the ID on the series folder.

This is the most reliable fix for stubborn titles — far more durable than repeatedly using Fix Match, because it lives in the file name and survives a library rebuild.

.plexmatch files

For TV series, Plex also reads a .plexmatch file placed in the series folder. It accepts hints like tvdbid, tmdbid, and imdbid, which override title and year guesses from the directory name. Useful when you cannot rename folders.

Common mistakes that break matching

• No year — the top cause of wrong matches.
• Extra tags in the file name giving the matcher more noise than signal.
• Several movies in one folder — Plex frequently merges or misreads these.
• Mixed libraries — movies and shows under one root.
• Inconsistent episode numbering that disagrees with the provider's ordering.

Renaming an existing library safely

Applying this convention to a library you already have is where things go wrong. A careless batch rename orphans artwork and subtitles, and there is no undo.

Three rules: preview every change before it touches disk, keep sidecars moving with their media, and keep a journal so a bad pass is reversible.

MetaTana does this specifically — it proposes a Plex-friendly layout, shows the diff before writing, moves subtitles and artwork alongside each title, and journals every change so any rename can be rolled back. It never modifies the media file itself.

After renaming

Scan your library. Matches, posters, and episode data should fill in automatically. If a handful of titles still resist, that is a metadata problem rather than a naming one — see how to fix Plex showing the wrong movie, or the Plex metadata manager overview. Using a different server? There is a Jellyfin naming guide too.