Wallpaper/Art

[docsuess84]

I had a couple questions on what Jellyfin actually does and does not do when it comes to the library management aspect of things. I’m primarily a Kodi user but I’m also a bit of a control freak and I never liked leaving the cover art and descriptors up to the various databases. I liked using a separate library tool so I could fine-tune each entry and I could get the best quality poster image or  find one I liked better than what was available in the databases and save the final product and preferred images along with an nfo file within a folder that contained the media file. That way, if I ever had to change things or start over, the bones of my library are all still there and it just needs to be rescanned by whatever system I’m using to all be put back together. Jellyfin seems to be using my existing library information. I’m still learning the UI, so I’m not totally sure, but can I basically do everything I want to do all within Jellyfin itself like modify or generate nfos, change the art work and then actually save it locally with the media file? Or are there some limitations and I should keep using a separate media manager tool like Mediaelch?

[TheDreadPirate]

By default, Jellyfin does not save anything in your media folders. But it can be configured to save both images and NFOs to your media folders. Any changes you make in the Jellyfin UI with regards to images should be reflected in the files it saves locally. I have not tried modifying metadata and verifying whether that is reflected in the NFOs.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

I have not tried modifying metadata and verifying whether that is reflected in the NFOs.

I did. Each modification to any media with an NFO will instantly have its NFO's "file modified time" updated. I opened them up and my changes appeared in them, so they do change with what you do in the GUI.

That said, make sure to set the "locked" tag in the NFOs to true (manually or in the GUI) so that Jellyfin doesn't overwrite your NFO metadata with new info from the metadata providers. And what's more, locking the metadata will only lock the fields/tags that are already populated. Jellyfin will still add non-existant entries to locked files.

You could also make the NFO files read-only to the Jellyfin user so that it won't ever modify them.

[docsuess84]

Oh dang. So it seems like I actually could do everything I want in-house. That’s fantastic and will make everything so much more streamlined and organized. I guess I need to actually figure out all the settings now.

[MrFusion]

I use local .nfo and store artwork in folder for similar control freak reasons. Just follow naming convention and you can pre-add posters etc before import. I’ve also manually created nfo’s and they will be used to pull from before a fetcher scan.

A few caveats - some special characters in a manually created .nfo can mess up the import. For example an ‘&’ in description will stop the .nfo from being used, the movie won't pull the metadata.

Option here was to remember to (or go back and) type '&;amp' and such - or just cut the description info from the failed nfo import, scan without it, and then add into the jellyfin edit metadata description field to clean it up. Both work and the update either way is pretty much instant.

When I first set up my library it was using ‘file.jpg’ which bugged massivly, it didn’t use all my manual Plex posters. But poster.ext works and now everything saves that way (no clue on if or why).

I wrote (asked chatGPT) a bash script that renamed them all to ‘poster.ext’ and jellyfin was not upset in the slightest. I also had a script to remove image links to folder.ext references in the .nfos and replaced with links to poster location without issue. Just needed do a library scan afterwards.

I also did a script to remove <trailer> tags from the .nfo as I decided I didn't want any YouTube connections after messing with that plugin. Totally fine… ran the script edited all the .nfos, and Jellyfin removed the trailer icon from the detail page of all the movies except the ones I had a local trailer for.

I also renamed some <genre> to <tag> manually in the .nfo and not only was Jellyfin fine with that, it rewrote the nfo and moved the <tag> from the list of <genre> to its correct spot when I did a metadata update.