How do you organize spin-off movies and TV shows?

[bigggtuna]

Let me start off by saying I know what the 'intended' answer is. All TV shows marked as unique shows on TMDB or whatever source you use should be their own series folder in a TV Shows library and all movies should be in a Movies library. I know this is how Jellyfin is intended to work and probably how most people do it. But I am trying to spark some conversation based on my experience and potential problems I've tried to solve around grouping media franchises. Maybe I'm just super anal about organization (I am), but maybe some people feel similarly and have good solutions for this.

So, let's take for example The Lord of the Rings franchise. There are 3 animated movies from the 70s-80s, the 3 Peter Jackson movies, 3 Hobbit movies and the new Rings of Power series. This is a perfect example of when I would use a Collection; many movies and/or shows that I want to be able to view in one central location. I have no issue with this, just using it as an example of a clear-cut case for Collections.

Then there's shows like Bob's Burgers. There's the main TV series and one canon movie. If watching the show in the intended order, you would watch seasons 1-12, then the movie, then continue with season 13 onwards. Franchises like this leave us with two options:


Option 1: Using Jellyfin the way it's intended would have me put the movie in the movies library. The problems I identified with this approach are 

• A) The only way to view them together now without using the search bar (which in some cases isn't an option as the movie title won't have the TV shows title in it) is to use a collection. It feels silly to me to have a collection of just one TV show and one movie. Maybe others don't feel this way. Regardless, issues B) and C) persist even if I do use a collection for this case.
  
• B) There is no way to specify that the movie should be watched between seasons 12 and 13.
  
• C) If someone is just browsing the 'Shows' library for something to watch and decides to start Bob's Burgers, they may never even know that the movie exists or is available on Jellyfin. The 'More Like This' tab does not work across movie and shows libraries nor does it seem to take titles with the same or similar names or media within the same franchise into account (I understand why, just stating the limitation).
  

Option 2: Adding a 'Movie' folder to the series folder alongside 'Season 1' etc. This is what I have been doing. This approach:

• Solves issue A) as they are now both viewable from the series view in Jellyfin with no need to create such a tiny collection.
  
• Somewhat solves issue B) as you can manually set the sort title to have this folder appear between season 12 and 13, however you cannot set it to play automatically before/after a certain episode like you can with specials in the case that it should be watched in the middle of a season or the user is just clicking 'play next'. Maybe I'll put this in as a future feature request since it seems simple enough.
  
• Solves issue C) since now the person who was just browsing will see the movie alongside the seasons of the show they clicked into.
  
• Also comes with the downside that metadata can no longer be fetched automatically in most cases. I have had mixed success with adding the tmdbid to the filename and in many cases it will interpret release years as season and episode pairs (i.e. '2009' as Season 20 Episode 09). You will need to add metadata manually most times and thumbnails are not always the best as Jellyfin will default to the image extractor.
  

This approach has worked fine for me and I like it. Even with having to manually set metadata and the limitations around auto-playing, it solves most of the issues I had with the intended approach and a few minutes extra work setting metadata isn't a roadblock for me.

However, I am struggling a bit with what to do for spin-off series. Get ready for a third example:
Rick and Morty has the main series and one spin-off series called 'Rick and Morty: The Anime'. I have been using the same approach as Bob's Burgers, create a folder on the same level as Season 1 etc. and manually edit the metadata of each episode; obviously more cumbersome than a single movie, but still solves the aforementioned problems.
However, spin-off series in particular come with the additional problem that a user is unable to search for them. In the Bob's Burgers example, episode names show up when using the search bar, so searching for the movie name will still show the movie as long as you set the metadata properly. But the search bar does not include folder names within series (again, I understand why, just stating the limitation).

Does anyone else feel this way? Do you have a better solution? Would putting feature requests in for 1) allowing non-specials media in a series folder to be played before/after an episode and 2) allowing non-season series folders to show up with search be feasible tasks? Would it be worth it or would I be the only person to use them? Does any of this matter? Probably not. Let me know your thoughts if you've read this far into my caffeine fueled organization special interest thought dump.

Cheers.

[TheDreadPirate]

Another option that is, IMO, simpler is to use playlists.

Jellyfin is pretty "dumb" when it comes to organization and is 100% reliant on how TMDB/TVDB structures things. And that is each show and movie are separate entities. The way things are fundamentally structured does not allow for the kind of organization you're describing. At least not in an automated way. There would need to be a metadata source that would group a spin-off under the same entity as the show it was spun-off from. And has an api and structure that isn't so foreign as to not be compatible with the "Seasons" and "Specials" structure of TV shows in Jellyfin.

Jellyfin would need quite a significant overhaul to be able to handle nesting a spin-off under the originating show with the available metadata sources.

Jellyfin just shows you what you have. If a franchise of shows and movies needs or should to be watched in a particular order, playlists are the way to go since they allow for arbitrary ordering of show episodes and movies.