Possible to organize using letter parent directories?

[Jinjo]

Hi, 

I'd like to know if it's possible to organize my shows by the first letter, so have top-level directories of A, B, C, D, etc., and then within each of those directories will be the actual show directories. I want to do this strictly to make it easier to manage and backup my files.

When I tried this, Jellyfin considered the A, B, C, etc. directories to be shows and populated them with show info. All actual show directories within the letter directories were ignored.

Here is an example of what I want to do using the official docs format... I screwed it up, but I think the idea's there:

Shows
├── A
│  ├──── Series Name A (2010)
│     ├──── Season 00
│     │  ├──── Some Special.mkv
│     │  ├──── Series Name A S00E01.mkv
│     │  └──── Series Name A S00E02.mkv
│     ├──── Season 01
│     │  ├──── Series Name A S01E01-E02.mkv
│     │  ├──── Series Name A S01E03.mkv
│     │  └──── Series Name A S01E04.mkv
│     └── Season 02
│        ├──── Series Name A S02E01.mkv
│        ├──── Series Name A S02E02.mkv
│        ├──── Series Name A S02E03 Part 1.mkv
│        └──── Series Name A S02E03 Part 2.mkv
└── B
   ├──── Series Name B (201
      ├── Series Name B S01E01.mkv
      ├── Series Name B S01E02.mkv
      ├── Series Name B S02E01-E02.mkv
      └── Series Name B S02E03.mkv

Thanks!

[tmsrxzar]

pretty sure this is going to mess up scraping because it's not going to know what show 'A' is and it's not going to ignore it

you could create a library and add each A-Z folder to it individually, a little work but only has to be done once

[Jinjo]

I see. Thank you for the reply.

How about a proposed change to the scraper. Any directories in square brackets are not directly scraped, but instead the scraper recognizes that as a directory "group" and then proceeds to process all directories below it. Effectively, the [dirs] are ignored by the scraper and it just moves down a level to continue its activities.

So in my use case the top-level directories would be [A], [B], [C], etc. But they could also be [anything else you want], [etc], and then shows live directly under those dirs.

If you went recursive you could even have nested group directories.

Time permitting, I might be able to take a stab at this if you're amenable. I'm a dev with 20 years experience.

[tmsrxzar]

seems like more effort than just adding 27 folders to a library source and the result will be 27 [A]-[Z] folders on your pc which my OCD doesn't love

but yea if you want to dig in and see if you have a way to ignore parents i won't be a negative voice, it's always good to have contributions

[Efficient_Good_5784]

To repeat what @tmsrxzar said with more detail, you can do this, but just don't link to the top-most "Shows" directory.
Jellyfin expects all sub-folders to be an entry for a show or movie.

In shows, create all directories (A through Z). Then in Jellyfin when creating or modifying a library, link to all the sub-directories instead of the top-most "Shows" directory.
This way, you can have a library named "Shows" and it will have access to all the sub-directories.

How about a proposed change to the scraper. Any directories in square brackets are not directly scraped, but instead the scraper recognizes that as a directory "group" and then proceeds to process all directories below it. Effectively, the [dirs] are ignored by the scraper and it just moves down a level to continue its activities.

So in my use case the top-level directories would be [A], [B], [C], etc. But they could also be [anything else you want], [etc], and then shows live directly under those dirs.

Since you can already achieve this by just doing what both me and @tmsrxzar stated, this functionality isn't needed.

This would just add more complexity to how Jellyfin handles this sort of thing.

[Jinjo]

I've done what was suggested and it's working great, so agreed with all your points.

Thanks for all the replies!