Sorting, Tagging, and Ordering (Part 2)
My archiving journey continues.
Apparently, media is one of those things that should not organized through folder hierarchy, but which benefit from a robust metadata system. The organization of my music library is a matter that will warrant another blog post along the way, but today I took some time to install Jellyfin locally to sort out all the movies, anime, tv series, stage plays and concerts (and the occasional weird mixed stream) that live on my external drive. Not too many things, but that's just another reason to be tidy now.
The previous organization followed this recurring scenario:
- My wife wants to watch a movie or a series;
- I retrieve it for her and put it on the usual, smaller drive we attach either to the TV or to her iPad;
- It either stays there forever (moved in a "seen" folder at most) or gets deleted.
This system was fine. I think it's still fine. Its main issue is that it relies too much on step 1, so every single time we feel like watching a movie we either have to spend time on it, or there's no easy way to just check what we got other than scroll through a couple of titles. And I don't like to hoard files if I can't organize them.
I didn't plan to use Jellyfin as a streaming service, just to have a nice view for my video files and then copy them to the usual drive, but my wife was pretty enthusiastic after seeing how it looked on localhost and quickly found out there's actually a client app for our TV. The setup was surprisingly fast too1, so I guess we're gonna try it out one of these next movie nights.
Admittedly, I got stuck for a bit because I realized my laptop thought my home network was a guest network, apparently since forever. Huh. I was never good at networks.↩