Organizing old cartoons

[JonDoe]

Hi everyone.

I got hold of some old cartoons of Popeye the Sailor and these, like many of that era, come in bundles or by year.
For example, i have 2 collections, each in 3 volumes, one that is subdivided by years, for ex 1933-1936, 1940-1943 ... while the other is the 75th anniversary collection that is as a whole dated in the 60's.

At first i just placed everything as it was and jellyfin had some poster images fetched for some of the files but not all and no cover images for the whole collection.
So i went and added numbering to the files and manual cover for collections but then there were no fetched images from online sources, just whatever ffmpeg scanned from the files.

Do you have any recommendation on how to organize / name these files & folders that makes sense for me (and the kids) and also for Jellyfin such that it identifies correctly the files (as best as it can) to retrieve online data and that files in a folder are played automatically one after the other, like an album of sorts ?

Thank you.

[paulc]

Best practice is, if you are not sure how to organize a particular series folder structure, go to the data sources and see how they do it. Like, Popeye the Sailor, for example, at TVDB ( https://thetvdb.com/series/popeye#seasons ) it is organized as Season year. For example, main folder Popeye the Sailor then folder Season 1933 and the file name for the first one listed under Season 1933 would be like, "Popeye the Sailor.S1933E01.Popeye the Sailor.ext" The next season folder would be Season 1934 and so on.

[JonDoe]

Thanks.

That helped auto-advancing to the next file in the same folder.
But no metadata gathered from online sources.
All except tvdb have useless grouping so i added the tvdb plugin and restarted but same result.
If i click on identify in the root folder and put the id from tvdb website into the appropriate field it finds nothing ...

[TheDreadPirate]

Can you give us some example folder and file names?

[jimmyjammy]

Quite often old cartoon collections (Looney Tunes, Disney etc.) are really a group of shorts which TMdB & IMdB recognize as movies. If you use the movie naming convention eg. Bully For Bugs (1953) . That is a Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes cartoon.

[paulc]

Quite often old cartoon collections (Looney Tunes, Disney etc.) are really a group of shorts which TMdB & IMdB recognize as movies. If you use the movie naming convention eg. Bully For Bugs (1953) . That is a Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes cartoon.

I'd use TVDB TV setup instead of movie folder setup for Looney Tunes and the other cartoons of this sort. On TVDB, the Looney Tunes TV ID is 72514 ( https://thetvdb.com/series/looney-tunes ) and, for example, Bully for Bugs is Season 1953, Episode 19. ( https://thetvdb.com/series/looney-tunes/episodes/88284 ) Folder name Looney Tunes. Season Folder: Season 1953. File Name LooneyToons.S1953E19.BullyForBugs.<ext>.

[JonDoe]

At first, most of them had just the name (no numbering scheme) and some files were recognized by the system with poster image and everything but not all.
But there was no way to just hit play and have them play one after the other, which for the kids is a major problem.

Then i set the files according to tvdb and now i get autoplay for individual folders and top folder but i get no metadata (poster images, etc).

Right now it's setup as
Popeye the sailor man
  Season 1943
      Popeye the sailor S1943E01 Name of file.avi
      ....
  Season 1944
  ....
  Season 1960

I also have Season 1961 where i placed files from the 75th anniversary edition which, by the filenames, were not found anywhere in the entire history.
But all this was done manually for every file, and it kinda defeats the point of the whole automatic media server thing.
I can do batch renaming easily but once you get to file by file ...

[Spook50]

Rather than clutter up the forum with another similar thread, I figured I would add to this one. I have the near-complete Looney Tunes collection, many of which I've upscaled and restored myself (with great results I might add), and as it is right now I have the cartoons organized by year, with a folder for each year containing the cartoons released in that year. So for example with the cartoon Duck Amok, I have it named "Duck Amuck (1953).mkv" in my "1953" folder.

I went with the movie naming convention for the sake of metadata from IMDB, but like with OP, my concern is the ability to just play through the cartoons continuously without having to just dump them all into one folder.

Is there a better naming/organization convention I could use, or would I be better off to just build playlists for whichever order I might want to watch the cartoons?

[TheDreadPirate]

You could use collections as well.