What actually is a .ignore file?

[Ugly-slug-123]

Hello,
I read the documentation and many forum posts about .ignore files. But nobody has actually ever said what it is?  
My testing show putting media in a folder labeled .ignore works as I would expect.
But putting a text document titled .ignore seems to do nothing.

Can someone help me out?

Thanks!

[theguymadmax]

Ensure that extensions are visible if you are using Windows, and there isn't a .txt at the end of the file. Having an .ignore file will cause Jellyfin skip whatever folder you have it in. In the example below, only Movies 1 & 2 will be shown in Jellyfin. 


Movies/
├── Movie 1/
│  └── Movie 1.mkv
├── Movie 2 /
│  └── Movie 2.mkv
├── Movie 3/
│  ├── Movie 3.mkv
│  └── .ignore

[Ugly-slug-123]

Thanks for the reply!
To be painfully clear to people like me:
A .ignore file is a text (or any file?) named .ignore, without an extension.

EDIT: works exactly how I want it to, thanks!

[Efficient_Good_5784]

The file can be empty, or it can contain any random data.
All Jellyfin cares about is that the name of the file is ".ignore"

So for people that are less tech-savy, you can simply create a blank text file and save that.
Then just rename the empty text file to ".ignore" and there you go.