Storing all metadata outside the media library

[TheDreadPirate]

With images, if you uncheck the "Save artwork" setting, it will save images in /config/metadata. Unless you already have images in your media directory, it will continue to use them. Same applies for NFOs. If you turn off NFO saver, but you already have them, Jellyfin will continue to use them. I believe info in NFOs are written to the database, but I'm not entirely sure.

If you removed your NFOs and removed the images, you'd have to "Search for missing metadata" or "Replace all metadata" and Jellyfin will pull down images from TMDB/TVDB/etc., and store them in /config/metadata. It is not doing that in real time.

If you were to go this route, having Jellyfin store everything in /config, the UI should be much faster since all that data is now on a SSD instead of a HDD.

The only draw back to this approach over using NFOs or images in your media directory is preserving custom images or custom metadata if you were to lose your /config data. If you aren't customizing images and metadata, there aren't really any drawbacks, but there are a lot of advantages.