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> I realised it doesn't improve my life, to care about folder structure and naming, so much that I insist on retaining it and hobbling the media browsing fronte

> I realised it doesn't improve my life, to care about folder structure and naming, so much that I insist on retaining it and hobbling the media browsing frontend. There's no good reason for any folder structure to hobble a media browsing frontend. There are multiple frontends I've tried for my personal library of ebooks (mostly Humble Bundles of software/hardware books), and a number of those frontends have an option that's basically one book per folder (i.e. all identically named files in that folder treated as different versions of the same book... epub, pdf, etc) and folders above that can be whatever you want. BookOrbit[1] supports arbitrary folder hierarchies and Readest[2] supports at least one level of intermediate hierarchy. In the context of existing software counterexamples, Jellyfin's delicate sensitivity to folder meta-structure is a regression from the baseline expectation. But I'd agree that ultimately folder naming requirements for the media items themselves makes good sense. > In which case, enjoy your UI being a series of nested folders. When the Jellyfin UI reflects those nested folders, I can tell it to only rescan a specific subfolder when I add a movie, rather than checking the whole library for new content. Folders and hierarchical structure are objectively useful, though our search-addled brains make that less obvious than it used to be. [1]: https://bookorbit.app/library-file-structure/#grouping-folders https://bookorbit.app/library-file-structure/#grouping-folde... [2]: https://readest.com/docs/library#import https://readest.com/docs/library#import

amiga386 8d ago
> There's no good reason for any folder structure to hobble a media browsing frontend. Sure, but what I'm saying is that it was a price I was willing to pay. I tried a lot of other media browsing software and they just didn't meet my needs like Jellyfin did. Could Jellyfin be more flexible? Sure. Does it need to be for me? Not at the moment. I'm getting the benefit right away, and might stand to get more benefit in future if it becomes more flexible on path/filename parsing. > a number of those frontends have an option that's basically one book per folder Jellyfin already supports that, but currently only for movies. Seems entirely possible it could do that for books or TV episodes too, if someone volunteers the time to land the server and UI changes for it. > When the Jellyfin UI reflects those nested folders, I can tell it to only rescan a specific subfolder when I add a movie, rather than checking the whole library for new content. Jellyfin supports realtime monitoring with inotify so it can see new/updated files as you add them, but this depends on the filesystem supporting it, and also I think it still has a bug where doesn't work on library directory paths that are symlinks. Jellyfin supports nested folders (Books, Music Videos and Other library types support a folder view), but their limitations are apparent: no homogenous filtering/sorting display, and for Music Videos and Other, no metadata collection.

amiga386 8d ago

> There's no good reason for any folder structure to hobble a media browsing frontend. Sure, but what I'm saying is that it was a price I was willing to pay. I tried a lot of other media browsing software and they just didn't meet my needs like Jellyfin did. Could Jellyfin be more flexible? Sure. Does it need to be for me? Not at the moment. I'm getting the benefit right away, and might stand to get more benefit in future if it becomes more flexible on path/filename parsing. > a number of those frontends have an option that's basically one book per folder Jellyfin already supports that, but currently only for movies. Seems entirely possible it could do that for books or TV episodes too, if someone volunteers the time to land the server and UI changes for it. > When the Jellyfin UI reflects those nested folders, I can tell it to only rescan a specific subfolder when I add a movie, rather than checking the whole library for new content. Jellyfin supports realtime monitoring with inotify so it can see new/updated files as you add them, but this depends on the filesystem supporting it, and also I think it still has a bug where doesn't work on library directory paths that are symlinks. Jellyfin supports nested folders (Books, Music Videos and Other library types support a folder view), but their limitations are apparent: no homogenous filtering/sorting display, and for Music Videos and Other, no metadata collection.