Renaming or replacing files in manually created collections

[cheeselord]

Hi all!

I've had my Jellyfin instance setup how I like it for a couple months now, but there's been one thing I've noticed about file renaming that I wasn't expecting.  I know there are docs dedicated to file naming, and I'm fairly positive following that guide will solve the behavior I'm experiencing, but I was wondering if it was at all possible to work around it.  From what I gather, Plex might handle things slightly differently.

I like to include a few other pieces of information in the file name such as audio/video codec or language.  If I rename this file or replace this file to include different audio or codec information in the filename, then Jellyfin seems to treat it as a brand new file.  This means it gets removed from any manually-created collections and it moves to first position in the "Newly Added" section.  Additionally, I have the "Date Added to Library" option selected within the metadata options in my Jellyfin dashboard.  I expected this to be the date the media was added and not the file itself.

This seems to happen with both series and movies, but if I can get it to not occur with just movies I'll take it!  It makes perfect sense why Jellyfin would do this - it is a "new" file after all - but I was expecting it to know that the underlying file is associated with the same media since it does reside in a parent directory that contains the media name.

Any insights, comments, suggestions are appreciated! Thanks!

[tmsrxzar]

you have it right that date added is used but since it's a new file the date added is "now" as you seem to have figured out

look in the jellyfin collections folder on the drive, manually, there are a bunch of xml files that contain the paths to files in those collections, you can change the path to the new filename so that jellyfin now knows the new file is in the collection

not much better than readding it to the collection and really the best advice is to name things the way you want before the first scan then never change them

[cheeselord]

Thank you for the reply!  I see what you're talking about regarding the XML files.  If I want this behavior, then you are right I will need to never change file names.

It looks like my renaming of files has caused duplicate entries within the collection XML as well.  I think this is the related issue.  This wouldn't solve my issue still, but interesting to note.

It's a shame, I was hoping for a clever workaround!