As a recent convert from Plex to Jellyfin, I’m going through my library correcting metadata, etc. and wondered what great ideas I could glean from the community.
I don’t use collections (should I?) because, at least on Plex, I could never completely agree with myself on what should be included in a collection and what shouldn’t.
At present I tend to just sort movies alphabetically (and then in order of release, i.e. 47 Meters Down comes before 47 Meters Down: Uncaged) and I use the sort title for that. But what do you guys suggest with things such as the Star Wars movies, or Indiana Jones movies — movies that don’t have similar titles, e.g. “Star Wars”, “The Empire Strikes Back”, “Return of the Jedi” — would you have them scattered alphabetically around your library, or would you use the sort title to call them “Star Wars 1”, “Star Wars 2”, etc. so they’re all grouped together (albeit breaking the alphabetisation)?
Any other hints and tips would be appreciated!
Maybe are you overthinking the process ?
I just dump movies in “movie” folder. Series in “series” folder. Etc…
Then you can choose how to sort them in Jellyfin.
Jellyfin also takes care of the collection part for you.
I got all star wars, Indiana Jones, alien, batman movies all nicely sorted and displayed in my “collections” tab. Had nothing to do myself.
Maybe I am. It’s just things like, for example, Batman.
You have the Michael Keaton version and the Robert Pattinson version, so it’s just ensuring the ‘89 version displays before the ‘22 version (as an example).
Then you have The Dark Knight which would show under “D”, whereas Batman Begins appears under “B”, so not together. I got around it by just numbering them sequentially under the Sort Title. But it does break the alphabetical display.
Yes, I’m anal about my library 🙂
I have one folder for movies, one for kids movies, shows etc. It takes some work, but for sorting similar titles I just click on the show and edit the meta data. There’s “Title”, and “sort title”, so in the case of Star wars and its sequels I leave “title” for Starwars, empire, and Jedi the same but change “sort title” to starwars1, starwars2, starwars3. Same goes for Harry Potter for the kids, or anything in a series with a subtitle rather than a number.
That’s exactly what I did on Plex and exactly what I’ve setup today on Jellyfin. Thanks! Seems to do what I want it to do.
I might give Collections a try as well, though. See whether it improves my library.
I gave one library labeled movies and one labeled classics. Movies go into movies and the old classics (classics are things like Abbott and Costello and the three stooges)
If you’re talking about filesystem sorting, Jellyfin docs publish the opinionated layouts:
- https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/
- https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows
- Other media have similar pages.
If you follow these naming and layout guides, the metadata auto-detection will work most optimally and you’ll rarely have to manipulate metadata manually id you’re dealing with well-known content.
It wasn’t so much that — that’s very similar (if not identical) to Plex conventions, so that’s already taken care of and my metadata, images, etc. are all being picked up just fine. It was just the sorting order of my movies to ensure that sequels follow on from each other even if not alphabetical.
For example, “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight”. Or “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, “War of the Planet of the Apes” and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”.
Oh yeah, for that collections are handy yeah. I believe they sort by release year by default which isn’t always perfect but is usually pretty decent.
Otherwise you’re into editing name metadata or something else to hack an existing sort order to your preference. I mostly don’t sweat this and just find the thing I want to watch from the main library.
Thanks for taking the time! 👍🏻
There isn’t much thinking involved in collections unless you want to make less common ones that span across franchises or something. You can also let jellyfin do it for you but I choose to do it myself.
More commonly you would just make them for related movies or series. For example I have an MCU collection that’s all the marvel stuff (movies and series), and same for Star Wars. Then much more simple ones like Die Hard, which just has 3 movies in it because that’s how many Die Hard movies were ever made.
Haha you’re ignoring everything past “… With a Vengeance” then? Fair enough! 🙂
Maybe I’ll take a look at collections then if it’s really straightforward.
I use PMM on my Plex container. Still waiting for a similar option plus a few other features for Jellyfin before I go all in on it.
I never actually used that, I probably should’ve taken a look before I stopped using Plex.
