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+--- Forum: General Questions (https://forum.jellyfin.org/f-general-questions)
+--- Thread: Bulk adding to collections (/t-bulk-adding-to-collections)
Bulk adding to collections - akirby83 - 2025-06-17
I'm planning on transitioning my home server from Windows 10 to Ubuntu. The problem with Jellyfin is I have a lot of collections with a ton of movies in them, and am not aware of any way to batch recreate these. I know there are XML files of the collections but I was under the impression these are kind of vestigial, and experimentally copying an XML file to the new install didn't result in it showing up, even after changing the paths in it to account for Linux file paths. Is there are a way to bulk recreate these collections or am I stuck manually creating them?
RE: Bulk adding to collections - akirby83 - 2025-06-20
I figured this out, I'll leave it here in case anyone is in my boat of need to transfer large collections from Windows to Linux.
- Make a copy of the collection folder with XML file, change the file paths inside the XML to ones for the target OS.
- Copy it to the standard Jellyfin collection location.
- Change the owner of the folder from root to jellyfin. This part appears to be critical and what I was missing. If you don't you can't delete or modify the collection, and a lot of weird things seem to happen like the collection being empty, the thumbnail disappearing, etc.
- Refresh your libraries and it should be there!