SOLVED: Problem with file names

[GreekLes]

Hi All,

Firstly, great product, well done those who've worked on creating & tweaking/improving it so far.   But I do have one problem.....

Jellyfin noob, so if someone has already asked or I've missed the answer somewhere DON'T SHOUT TOO LOUDLY.....

Got a number of rips which refuse to appear under Collections, common factor is they have a colon in the film title, but not in the ripped file name as it is an unallowed symbol.   Example Star Wars:  etc., Mission :Impossible  etc.

Found somewhere that you need to copy the file name as it appears on IMDB for JF to recognise it, but that is how it appears on IMDB, & Windows (Linux too?) won't allow the colon.

Can't find a way to manually add files to Collections in the way that I've had to name them, i.e. without a colon.   Without the file appearing in the first place I can't edit the metadata to correct it for storing in Jellyfin.

Any solutions?

Apart from that, I seem to have found solutions for all other problems encountered, so reckon I'll be sticking with this for my media.

[TheDreadPirate]

I don't see any Jellyfin documentation explicitly saying colons aren't allowed. But I'd recommend avoiding special characters, like colons, in both the folder names and file names. Except where appropriate. Even using dashes in certain ways can throw off the file name parser when it is constructing the query for metadata. For example, you can have multiple versions of a movie (not for TV shows) in one listing. Say you have an old movie that has a black & white and colorized version. You would name the files like this.

Movie Name - [Black and white].mkv
Movie Name - [Colorized].mkv

Some people have triggered weird behaviors because they used dashes in their file name to separate some file info, like codec and resolution, etc.

I've given up on "accurate" file names in favor of just making it easier for Jellyfin. At the end of the day, you're using Jellyfin's interface and won't see the file names anyway.

[GreekLes]

Just realised what the problem is & it's not with the colons.
I've got my films in 2 separate folders, one for collections (Bond, M:I, PotC, etc.) & one for films general. I've been trying to keep them in their respective sets as, when they were all in the same folder, JF insisted on removing them from sets & presenting the whole lot together.
Been trying to find a way to do what I want & I was trying to use "Collections", but JF will only auto-recognise them as such if they have the same title prefix. Creating collections from "Add to collection" results in many additional separate collections instead of under a single one main "collections" header, further sub-divided once the collections header has been opened up.
Must be a way to do it, I hope, so I'll keep playing.

[GreekLes]

Found the way to do it, not pretty but it works.
Put all film collections in a new folder called "Film sets", then used that to feed into Collections, allowing auto adding to start with, then sorting through to manually create the ones missing.
It works, all that matters!!