Animes - Organize by seasons, browse by seasons and view state

[zenas003]

Hey everyone. 

I thought I give Jellyfin again a try to see if it fits my desires on how to organize my Anime series. Below you can find a description on how I'd like to organize and browse my library. Maybe you folks can help me out on whether I can achieve such a setup. 

I have 1 library with multiple folders added. I mainly spread things across folders because of diskspace needs. From time to time I move sub-folders from one "root" to another to free space. In best case Jellyfin would detect the same series was moved and just updates the index (keeping details like watched episodes). 

Each "root" folder I add to my 1 library is organized like this: 

Code:

[root]
\[season name] (e.g. Autumn-2023, Winter-2025). 
  \[series name] (e.g. Ameku Takao no Suiri Karte, Ao no Exorcist - Yosuga-hen)
    \Series Name Episode Number.ext (e.g.  Ao no Exorcist - Yosuga-hen E01.mkv)

The "Season" in my case is the typical seasons in which animes are released, equal to the "Season" metadata in AniDB: https://anidb.net/anime/18735

Now when it comes to browsing I'd like to browse my series in these ways:

1. I want to browse into dedicated "seasons" and check which animes (or episodes) I haven't watched yet. So its more a folder structure browsing style but seeing metadata properly. 
2. I want to browse series by genre (Netflix style?). Optionally I want to filter out Animes I have seen already. 
3. I just want to browse globally across all series. Optionally I want to filter out Animes I have seen already.

So far I am rather facing challenges using Jellyfin for my desired style: 

* When create 1 library with many folders in the described structure. The metadata scanning is just messed up. it doesn't know that the series titles/folders are nested like described.
* When adding every "[season name]" folder individually, scanning works. but I loose the "by-season" browsing capabilities. 
* (at least when using the web interface) There just seem to be an initial flat view with all series and you can apply filters (great). You can also browse by genre, but not filter anymore (sad). 
* When I create multiple libraries (per season) I cannot browse all series across seasons. 
* I tried to enable the raw "Folders" view, but it doesn't really offer my real folder structure when adding the season folders individually. Its again flattened. 

Is it possible to achieve what I want with Jellyfin? I'm thinking somehow of these bits but I'm lost if this is available:

1. Can I tell Jellyfin somehow better how to handle the subfolders in every library "root" added? That would help me organizing the files in my desired way. 
2. Is there a way to create specialized browsing views using the metadata? Either by configuration or developing a plugin? It should work in all clients though (watching on TV vs. watching on notebook). 
3. Can I somehow get a raw file system browsing experience in Jellyfin? And as soon a "folder" with a series is detected the metadata should be shown. 

Looking forward to your feedback.

[TheDreadPirate]

I can think of a way to achieve what you want, but not by organizing your files in the way you are currently doing.

You CAN have the "Season" (year+season) folders with the series in it, but each "Season" would have to be added to a library. Either in their own library, each "Season" being a separate library, or in one big library with each "Season" folder added as a library root.

With the former ("Season" libraries), you'd just end up with a boat load of libraries and you'd need to ensure that you didn't enable merging of shows across libraries. With the latter (one big anime library), you would then need to add each actual show's season to a Collection. And you'd name that collection to "Winter 2025", etc. The latter would require the "standard" file organization we have documented.

Library root > Show name (year) [tmdbid-#####] > Season # > S##E##.mkv

You'd add each "Season #" to the appropriate "Season + Year" collection it belongs to.