How to Rapidly Name Your Movie and Show Folder/File Names the Jellyfin Way

[Damon Lynch]

Rationale

Sometimes a movie or a TV show’s name clashes with others from the same year. For example, there are two very different 1997 films named The Castle. Jellyfin has a built-in mechanism to accurately identify media, overcoming the problem of ambiguous names. Jellyfin calls this mechanism media provider identifiers. Here I will simply call this naming mechanism the Jellyfin way.

The Jellyfin way makes for a better Jellyfin experience. Most obviously, you can be sure your media files are accurately represented in your library. If you happen to have a film like The Castle (1997), or any other film or TV show that can be misrecognized (it happens), when using the Jellyfin way, you know that it will have the correct title, thumbnail, and description. Less obviously, but perhaps just as usefully, if you are organizing a large collection of media files over an extended period of time, naming your folders or files the Jellyfin way allows you to quickly see what you have and have not organized.

The Jellyfin way uses IMDb or TMDB, embedding the database’s ID into the file/folder name. For the two 1997 films named The Castle, using IMDb their respective Jellyfin names are:

• The Castle (1997) [imdbid-tt0118826]
  
• The Castle (1997) [imdbid-tt0120075]
  

It's not much fun typing in these names. It is much more efficient to get the correct database ID and have a program generate the name for you. I wrote a free and open source program to do just that: Modest Movie Metadata. For now, it only works with IMDb.



How to use Modest Movie Metadata

I designed the program to be as efficient as possible when working with a large number of media. I wrote it for hands-free use, so you don't even need to be looking at it to use it in your workflow. Here is how to use it best:

1. Open IMDb in your web browser, open a file manager, and run Modest Movie Metadata.
   
2. On the IMDb website search for the TV show or movie you need to the name for. Alternatively, use Google to search for the show or movie’s name, and the IMDb result will likely be near the top. I have found for more obscure shows or movies that Google gives more accurate results than the IMDb website itself.
   
3. Once you have opened the IMDb page, use your browser's shortcut key to go to the browser's URL bar, and copy the webpage's entire URL into your clipboard.
   
4. Modest Movie Metadata monitors changes to the clipboard, looking for IMDb IDs. It can find these IDs anywhere in the clipboard content, which is why it is irrelevant if you copy all or some of the URL.
   
5. Using the IMDb ID, Modest Movie Metadata will query the IMDb website to get the metadata necessary to generate the file/folder name in the Jellyfin way.
   
6. While Modest Movie Metadata is querying IMDb, go to your file manager to rename an existing file or folder, or create a new folder (use your file manager's shortcut key to rename an existing file/folder, e.g. F2 on Windows). Modest Movie Metadata will emit a short sound to let you know when it has generated the name, and will copy it to the clipboard. All you need to do is paste it in.
   

If you prefer, you can enter only the title and year into Modest Movie Metadata, and attempt to look up the IMDB ID by clicking the Get button. When there are multiple results from IMDb , Modest Movie Metadata will display all of them, with clickable links to their respective IMDb web pages. You then choose one of them. While this works, in practice, it is typically easier to search for the content on the IMDb website, and then simply copy the URL to the clipboard.

Installation

To install Modest Movie Metadata on Windows, go to the program's Releases page on GitHub, and download the installer for the latest version. The installer is only for 64-bit Windows 10 and 11.

Limitations

There are five primary limitations to Modest Movie Metadata:

1. It currently uses only IMDb, not TMDB. It could quite likely be improved to use TMDB in addition to IMDb.
   
2. There are no options. Nothing can be configured if your way of doing things differs from the way the program does things.
   
3. As mentioned above, the installer is only for 64-bit Windows. It should work equally well on Linux and macOS, but for that you need to know how to install Python packages and run a Python script. If somebody would like to volunteer to produce a macOS installer, I would be delighted (I don't own a Mac myself). If there is demand, I can create a Linux package.
   
4. The user interface runs only in English.
   
5. If you copy a password into the clipboard that somewhere contains the letters tt immediately followed by an unbroken sequence of one or more numerals, Modest Movie Metadata will assume that the tt and numerals constitute an IMDb ID, and query the IMDb using that ID (not the entire contents of the clipboard). 
   

[rygle]

Hi, sounds great, but you might want to chat with the authors of MediaElch about joining forces with them.

https://github.com/Komet/MediaElch

As far as I know, github user bugwelle started it several years ago, and user komet joined in. I have made very minor contributions and they are friendly and open to contributions.

It's written with Kodi in mind first, but I find it works well with Jellyfin if I get it to name the artwork how Jellyfin likes it. As Jellyfin can use .nfo files this helps. It gets metadata and artwork from IMDB, TMDB, fanart.tv and some other sources. It does TV, movies and music.

[JFDK]

I just wanted to say thank you very much for sharing this utility.  It is exactly what I wanted/needed while I learn how to name things properly for Jellyfin.  Great tool!

[M.PATATE]

Thank you

Is it possible to have a V2 where we can switch the langage in your app ?

I'm french and it will be very usefull for me to copy the title of the movie in french, not the original title.

That will be very appreciated because your program is simple and easy to use

[Damon Lynch]

Is it possible to have a V2 where we can switch the langage in your app ?

The program's source code is fully open and is licensed using the GPL 3. If anyone wants to implement that new feature I would be happy to incorporate it. Alternatively, if someone wants to sponsor me to implement it using GitHub sponsors, that would be excellent. All of this assumes the API the program uses to access IMDb supports the feature, of course.