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+--- Thread: Graceful handling of moving files and deleting media (/t-graceful-handling-of-moving-files-and-deleting-media)
Graceful handling of moving files and deleting media - viss - 2025-08-17
I have a two part jellyfin setup. The server is running inside of an incus container on an nvidia jetson orin nano. It has a 4tb m.2 ssd on board. Deluge and Sickchill work together to fetch things, and those things end up on that 4tb ssd. If stuff is good, and I'd like to keep it, I migrate it across to a synology rackstation in my home office, which has 32tb of storage. Deluge handles this well, I can just "move download folder" to its forever home on an smb mount to that nas.
This is where the trouble happens. When I move stuff or delete stuff Jellyfin just has no idea wtf to do. Before I switched to Jellyfin I was using plex. Plex seems to handle this just fine, and it did not occur to me that this would be a problem until after I moved shop to Jellyfin. Now every time I move something, I have to manually delete and re-add it to various playlists, because Jellyfin "can't tell that something has changed locations, even though its doing library scans multiple times daily".
This is also exacerbated by the fact that Jellyfin has a lot of trouble identifying media. Everything that lands on my nas gets mis-classified, and its largely because it can't seem to tell if something is a show or a movie. I have to go manually re-identify a ton of stuff, and THAT is an issue because I can't just select 500 items and say "this is all a show, and its all adventure time". I have to do them one by one.
So: tl;dr - having Jellyfin be aware of media deletions or the moving of media would be a great help, and also massively reduce downstream complexity events.
RE: Graceful handling of moving files and deleting media - Anderdea - 2025-09-24
I agree with the above request. I am using Plex and wanted to possibly migrate over to Jellyfin. I very much liked what I saw using Jellyfin but not being able to delete, as an example, TV series episodes after watching them on the client side may be a non starter for me. Plex allows this with no issues.
RE: Graceful handling of moving files and deleting media - Dex Luther - 2025-09-27
(2025-08-17, 08:10 PM)viss Wrote: This is also exacerbated by the fact that Jellyfin has a lot of trouble identifying media. Everything that lands on my nas gets mis-classified, and its largely because it can't seem to tell if something is a show or a movie. I have to go manually re-identify a ton of stuff, and THAT is an issue because I can't just select 500 items and say "this is all a show, and its all adventure time". I have to do them one by one.
You can solve half your problem by splitting you're media into 2 libraries. One for TV shows and then one for movies. This, of course, would mean you'd have to split your media into separate folders too.
RE: Graceful handling of moving files and deleting media - wkearney99 - 2025-09-28
I'd also love to see JF have the ability to purge items that are no longer present.
Either with a manual or crontab scheduled per-library function that goes throught the library and removes entries for anything where the media location is no longer present.
Making it manual would help avoid scenarios where the media is offline but not actually "gone". As in, on a NAS network share that's temporarily unavailable (for whatever reasons).
I could see where having it as a scheduled activity and remote shares could be problematic. You might not want the database to lose all the 'watched' data just because the network connection was interrupted. Nor the server thrashing of re-scanning a library. Thus leaving it as solely a per-library manually triggered dashboard function seems like a good idea.
RE: Graceful handling of moving files and deleting media - JellyJeff - 2025-10-09
Jellyfin could also create a list of items that are absent and update this list during library scans. And buttons in the library admin menu to manually delete one, several selected (check box) or all of the items in this list from the library database.