Emby folder display issue

[GrimReaper 4739]

1 hour ago, Teddy said:

I think most of us want an option in the new version on the server to make it work like 4.8 with folders

I wouldn't want to be a bearer of bad news or jinx it, but knowing how these things generally go once implemented, regression is quite unlikely, I wouldn't get my hopes too high up that it'll be reverted - it is much more likely that it'll just be further expanded with additional features that might somehow make it closer to previous iteration. Hence my suggestion would be to try and find some way to adapt as much as practically possible - if feasible. And tbh, IMHO there simply isn't a lot of traction about it - 10ish users commenting here is simply not enough of a critical mass that might swing the pendulum. But it wouldn't be the first time that I'm wrong, I might be surprised just as you would (pleasantly be) if it were reverted, guess time will tell. Again, those are just my personal views, in no way, shape or form they represent, indicate or imply Emby Team's decisions or intentions. 

[mrmixed 77]

6 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

I wouldn't want to be a bearer of bad news or jinx it, but knowing how these things generally go once implemented, regression is quite unlikely, I wouldn't get my hopes too high up that it'll be reverted - it is much more likely that it'll just be further expanded with additional features that might somehow make it closer to previous iteration. Hence my suggestion would be to try and find some way to adapt as much as practically possible - if feasible. And tbh, IMHO there simply isn't a lot of traction about it - 10ish users commenting here is simply not enough of a critical mass that might swing the pendulum. But it wouldn't be the first time that I'm wrong, I might be surprised just as you would (pleasantly be) if it were reverted, guess time will tell. Again, those are just my personal views, in no way, shape or form they represent, indicate or imply Emby Team's decisions or intentions. 

I appreciate your honest assessment.  But I also still want it fixed and supported going forward, so I am posting yet again.  Until then, I'm also planning to revert back to 4.8 and stay there indefinitely.  As I am unwilling to blow up my folder structure, the only workaround I have for my use case would be the long-awaited nested collection upgrade, along with a couple of new enhancements to customize precisely what titles and collections are allowed to appear on any given navigation tab (i.e. to control the designation of "Movies" vs "TV" vs anything else I want to enumerate within a library).  However, even if all of those enhancements were implemented, it is painful to consider how much time it would take me to create a collection for every folder in my library, just to get them to group together and display the way they used to.  And having to create so many collections simply to replace folders would honestly make the "Collections" tab worthless to me, also, without having more customization options there, too.

Just to reiterate two points I have made previously:

• this issue is significant enough that I, along with a handful of other users, literally created forum accounts to report what we thought was a bug.  Assuming that not everyone in this slightly more "old-school" cohort is not an early adopter, there will be more users stacking up over time who are unhappy with this change.  Certainly the fact that none of us are beta testers would suggest that you're going to have more people upgrading late than early.
• this issue is relatively easy to fix, in that the only thing that needs to revert is a flag in the metadata settings.  The 4.9 UI still works the way I want it to with a 4.8 database.  So literally nothing has changed in terms of the UI coding--all that needs to be changed is within the metadata engine.  It's not necessarily simple to deploy to the wild--there are going to be ramifications and some form of database rebuilding for certain users depending on whether they upgraded to 4.9 and clobbered the database, and so on.  But providing a fix sooner rather than later could potentially help mitigate that impact and also give all of us a path forward. 

And there are lots of ways in which this could be fixed.  A per-library toggle would be sufficient, with the risk that users might not understand it and could whack things from time to time (and it would slightly complicate release testing by adding yet another configuration option to verify).  Less drastic would be to simply restore "Folder View" and instead create a separate "Filesystem View" for whatever users Luke was trying to accommodate with this change--he could even implement the new "folder" icons he had mentioned in a previous post.  And then literally everyone would have the view that they want.

[Zelig 48]

On 11/10/2025 at 5:08 PM, GrimReaper said:

That is up to the Devs, I'm just trying to assist everyone and find equivalent (as far as possible) solutions currently, as this is what we have to work with atm. Will it ever go back as it was? Have no idea. Can some intermediate solutions be found? Maybe, but certainly not without few trials and/or hits and misses. As stated somewhere previously in the thread, I haven't clicked on Folders tab in any of my libraries for better part of a decade - hence some reciprocal assistance to better explain certain scenarios would be welcome. This latest part of conversation stemmed from:

As far as I see it, it is possible, hence further clarification is asked for. 

I'm not against anyone here, quite the contrary, just trying to help find - if possible - suitable replacement feature. Nothing more, nothing less. 

So far, the only solution I found to make things as they were is NOT to have the actual movies on it's own folder but all of them in the same folder.

Like this:

And you get a folder view like we used to:

Even though the Emby Knowledge Base still recomends this:

 

I've been using the recomended structure since the begining of time.

Thousands of movies with this structure.

THIS NO LONGER WORKS

Since, as you say, it seems unlikely to go back in future releases to a usable EMBY..

Could someone, at least, post a detailed tutorial on how to go back to versión 4.8 because the other solution will take me forever

 

[GrimReaper 4739]

17 minutes ago, Zelig said:

So far, the only solution I found to make things as they were is NOT to have the actual movies on it's own folder but all of them in the same folder.

Correct, as said:

On 11/10/2025 at 8:51 PM, GrimReaper said:

if movies are out-of-folders

they are treated as media items (as previously single-item folders were when collapsed). 

17 minutes ago, Zelig said:

Could someone, at least, post a detailed tutorial on how to go back to versión 4.8 because the other solution will take me forever

As stated previously:

On 11/2/2025 at 8:40 PM, GrimReaper said:

You cannot rollback between different branches - i.e. 4.9 > 4.8 (unless you have a full previous version backup) due to db changes, you'll need to rebuild your library.

You can't go back, you need to rebuild your library, i.e. start from scratch. If you save NFOs/artwork with your media, that'd speed up the process, else all metadata/images will have to be re-downloaded. Also, all custom edits will be lost if NFOs not saved in media folders. 

[halitayarci 13]

On 11/12/2025 at 1:07 PM, Zelig said:

So far, the only solution I found to make things as they were is NOT to have the actual movies on it's own folder but all of them in the same folder.

Like this:

This is not a solution in my opinion because when you have over 1500 films already arranged in early folder formation, the amount of time it will take is huge. Especially when my files in the folder are named like: "01.mp4" for the video and "landscape.jpg", "backdrop.jpg", "poster.jpg", "01.nfo" under "12 Angry Men (1957)" folder. I have to change the names to "12 Angry Men (1957).mp4", "12 Angry Men (1957)-landscape.jpg", "12 Angry Men (1957).nfo" etc. Now try to multiply this process by 1500... I will never understand why they tried to fix something which was not broken...

[Neminem 1518]

10 minutes ago, halitayarci said:

why they tried to fix something which was not broken...

I guess that it was requested by a lot of people.

And no one stod up a said it was a bad idea

[Happy2Play 9780]

Guess folder view was used in a way it shouldn't have been designed for.  But guess everyone will have to wait for Lukes collapsed combine Movie/Show tab.  As no matter how you look at it with the previous collapse switches being deprecated it will be more of a real folder view going forward. 

[Teddy 100]

1 hour ago, Neminem said:

I guess that it was requested by a lot of people.

And no one stod up a said it was a bad idea

Well, maybe I was the only one, but when I installed the beta version and saw the folder problem, I mentioned it and went back to the stable version 3.8, praying that it wouldn't be included in the stable version 3.9, but sadly it has been.

[Teddy 100]

I just hope Luke allows the folder system that has been working for years to continue functioning, because otherwise, for many, Emby may remain stuck on version 3.8.

[Teddy 100]

35 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Guess folder view was used in a way it shouldn't have been designed for.  But guess everyone will have to wait for Lukes collapsed combine Movie/Show tab.  As no matter how you look at it with the previous collapse switches being deprecated it will be more of a real folder view going forward. 

Sorry but you say "it will be more of a real folder view going forward", Is there anything more realistic than letting each user choose how their folders will look, instead of it being forced like in version 3.9?

[Happy2Play 9780]

21 minutes ago, Teddy said:

Sorry but you say "it will be more of a real folder view going forward", Is there anything more realistic than letting each user choose how their folders will look, instead of it being forced like in version 3.9?

I guess in the end it is just a Name on a Tab so views will change.

[Steven 158]

It’s real in the sense that emby is metadata driven, and that defines the categories.

The problem is if you’ve built your collection around your own needs that doesn’t depend on this. I had a similar personalised setup many years ago but I had to bite the bullet and move to the way things were going. And if you think how many have commented on this issue compared to how many users there are, then it is not much of an issue to the majority.

[mrmixed 77]

21 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Guess folder view was used in a way it shouldn't have been designed for.  But guess everyone will have to wait for Lukes collapsed combine Movie/Show tab.  As no matter how you look at it with the previous collapse switches being deprecated it will be more of a real folder view going forward. 

What is the harm in restoring Folder View to give everyone flexibility in folder organization?

While I readily admit that my folder organization by my own custom pseudo-genres is slightly redundant, I really like the fact that it offers me two related but distinct ways (Folder View and Genre View) to navigate my library.  Other people have pointed to folder structure based on Director names, or Decades, both of which make a lot of sense for organization.  And I prefer this view to literally anything else.  My mixed library has content that is neither Movies nor TV (random viral kiddie music videos, for example) and @Luke's collapsed Movie/Show tab is going to force me to literally add a collection for every folder in the library.  This is just obtuse, given that the titles already exist in a folder, and my kids were all quite happy navigating this content using Folder View.  And I'm not going to segregate every single dinky little piece of non-movie/non-tv content out into a separate library.

For me, the real underlying issue is my ability to keep related titles located adjacently in my file system.  If I wanted to make a backup copy of a particular collection of titles to loan to someone, I want to just be able to pull a single folder (and subfolders) onto a portable hard drive and be done.  I don't want to go hunting around for up to two dozen titles scattered around in a flat file structure.  Organizing things on my terms allows me to know what I have, know what I might want to add, and I can manage it easily. 

It seems to me that the power users and decision-makers here are making decisions to cater to those with massive libraries and/or users of Radarr.  Maybe this is the majority of users.  But I don't understand why both groups can't co-exist. 

 

Could someone link to the enhancement post that started this entire thing?  Something about the folder icon not being big enough and confusing people? 

I still don't understand why this change is considered to be a good idea, and I totally agree with @halitayarcithat this change is fixing something that wasn't broken.  And it makes things more confusing by treating folders with movies different than folders with tv shows:

 

[WinXP 15]

Whilst the Android app - and the web client have the ability to make a change via User / App Settings / Display / Auto open single items in folder view - the Android TV client does not.  Another step in its degradation - but not the point I am making here.
After making that 'open single items in folder view' change in the web client or Android app - you can indeed click through to the movie in its folder.
But the movie at top level view in a folder - not all movies show PLAYED.  Using the Play State filter for Played / Unplayed - does not work - as that top folder is a virtual image - it does not reflect reality.  Metadata folders vs actual folders.
So new movies added to folders within Movies Library under sub folders (genre etc) who - for us - for YEARS - have happily had this work perfectly - now have a folder with a bunch of movies added - that no longer show played / unplayed correctly.  Try to mark a movie as PLAYED does not end up with the green tick.
But some do have the green tick - these were movies which were added prior to 4.9.1.80.   But that is not consistent.  Many do not show PLAYED when they have been.
Not only is my folder setup no longer as per previous server version - there is no consistency in working out what has happened to my (many thousands) movie library via 4.9.1.80
 

[mrmixed 77]

On 11/13/2025 at 12:05 PM, Happy2Play said:

Guess folder view was used in a way it shouldn't have been designed for.  But guess everyone will have to wait for Lukes collapsed combine Movie/Show tab.  As no matter how you look at it with the previous collapse switches being deprecated it will be more of a real folder view going forward. 

The combined Movie/Show tab does not replace the functionality that we used to have in Folder View, unless you also implement nested collections (on a recursive basis, to accommodate any number of levels of nested collections).  And then we would might as well ask now for you to start building some sort of scan function which would automatically create collections based on titles that are grouped in the same folder.  Otherwise you are asking the compulsive file system curators to spend hours manually creating Collections to replicate what Folder View used to do implicitly.

I'm mildly concerned to find that you did get feedback on this change in beta and glossed over the real issue:

And I'm further peeved that you knew you were going to make a subset of users unhappy with this change, but ultimately went ahead anyway.

 

[JeremyG 30]

This problem does suck real bad.   For the past month I thought my daughter just screwed something up with the display settings and havent taken the time to see if i could fix it until today.   Came here to report it and found thread 

[JeremyG 30]

Actually kinda infuriating, i just tried the "fix" here of "Auto open single items in folder view" but it's not great. ...like someone said it doesnt show folders as played.   Kinda lame.

Btw, the reason I insist on folder view is because i categorize my movies by genre.   When I'm in folder view the movie/genre relationship is 1-to-1.  I have a single folder for "Super Hero Movies".  But if I try to use the movies tab the same movies show up in multiple places. 

Super Hereos show up in "Action"
Snoopy Movies show up in "Comedy"
Documentaries show up in "music"

It means if i'm browsing for a movie, no matter what I do, I see the same movies multiple times. 

It's worse than Netflix.

 

Edited November 15, 2025 by JeremyG

[mrmixed 77]

11 hours ago, JeremyG said:

Super Hereos show up in "Action"
Snoopy Movies show up in "Comedy"
Documentaries show up in "music"

It means if i'm browsing for a movie, no matter what I do, I see the same movies multiple times. 

It's worse than Netflix.

 

Totally agree.  @GrimReaperand I had this exact discussion a while back in this same thread.  I know I can change metadata providers, or manually edit the genres, but doing this to the level I would prefer is tedious, and would further defeat the purpose of having the Genre View available for any of viewers that might actually want to navigate my content using a Netflix-style approach.  I too really prefer the 1:1: title navigation that Folder View offers.  Emby needs to be fixed to accommodate both approaches like it used to.

I think that my library (generally a family-oriented collection of titles, and probably smaller than most of the long-time users here--but still large enough that rebuilding the entire thing when the metadata gets whacked is very undesirable) is just better organized when I control the categories.  I have no desire to grow my library to a massive size or abdicate management of the whole thing to Radarr.  But the dev's current approach seems to be geared only towards those types of users.

Granted, there are ways of separating libraries to keep children's content separate from the other media, but my kids are now old enough that I don't mind keeping anything that isn't explicitly rated-R in our main library so it is all readily available in one place.  And I can easily categorize things by having a folder for "Children's Shows", etc., to group together all of the really kiddie stuff that they have outgrown.  It's nicely organized from the file system perspective, and in the future if they have kids of their own (or just want to rewatch for childhood nostalgia), I can just give them a single folder with all of their old titles that they used to watch when they were little.  Pulling out a particular category of such titles using the now exclusively-supported approach of a flat folder structure would be an absolute pain in the neck.

Meanwhile, Genre View is largely a wreck, which I do edit from time to time when it gets really unwieldy.  But the online providers are just setup way too broadly in general.  I'll add a few more examples to your list above:

• "Muppets Take Manhattan" shows up in "Romance"
• "Bluey" and "Peanuts" appears alongside "Seinfeld" and "Friends" in comedy.
• "Star Trek" TV shows are both "Action", "Adventure", "Drama" (and some are "Mystery")  when in reality no person in their right mind would ever need or want to find it anywhere other than "Science Fiction".
• Meanwhile, the "Ice Age" short "No Time For Nuts" gets a "Science Fiction" designation because the plot involves time travel, but there's no reason this needs to be categorized any differently than all of the other Ice Age titles. 

 

*** You may be hosed if you upgraded a month ago and the backups have already rotated out, but there is some means of salvaging your setup on a temporary basis if you still have a backup of your pre-upgrade database.  See the various posts above.

 

[AngelSing 49]

On 10/3/2025 at 9:24 PM, Luke said:

Hi, this makes the folder view more accurate, but you can avoid the extra click by going into your user display settings.

So click the user icon in the top right -> app settings -> display, then check this option:

Please let us know if this helps. Thanks.

This does not work if you use the Windows app. Months without receiving an update in the Windows app. 

[Luke 42077]

On 11/15/2025 at 11:49 AM, AngelSing said:

This does not work if you use the Windows app. Months without receiving an update in the Windows app. 

HI, apologies for the delay on that. We are working on getting the windows app updated. Thanks.

[Teddy 100]

A question @luke, with this update the behavior of nested folders will work as in version 4.8. for those of us who already have it configured by artist, year, genre...but also will work for other applications like Android app?

Edited November 17, 2025 by Teddy

[Luke 42077]

On 11/17/2025 at 4:43 AM, Teddy said:

A question @luke, with this update the behavior of nested folders will work as in version 4.8. for those of us who already have it configured by artist, year, genre...but also will work for other applications like Android app?

HI, if you're asking about the windows app update, yes it will be updated to match our other apps.

[mrmixed 77]

On 11/13/2025 at 12:05 PM, Happy2Play said:

Guess folder view was used in a way it shouldn't have been designed for.  

Why is it now considered to be a design issue to hide folder metadata for single-title-folders?  This previous collapsing approach seems to have been a more logical choice.  Single-title-folders only exist to group extra content underneath the main title, so it seems normal that Emby should be designed to not throw up an extra folder layer in between, and allow the metadata to be accessed/sorted/filtered inline with all of the adjacent titles in the folder.

[Raelone 19]

With that extra folder layer you also can no longer sort by year or any other sorting other than by folder name.  I am still confused why one of my mixed libraries still shows the old style, and another has this broken style.  Both have the same directory structures as that is required for Radarr to work correctly.  So Emby can still do what it used to do, the question is how to make other libraries work like the old way.  Both were created back with 4.8. The library setups for both mixed-content libraries are identical except for the directory for their roots.

[cp41 42]

I am similarly afflicted where most of my movies were updated to this new (less desirable) folder structure, but a random assortment of movies remain viewed as single items, even though they ALL are in the same folder structure. The upgrade to 4.9 inconsistently updated items in my library. So I cannot sort alphabetically since it puts all folders first and then my random non-folder movies. 
 

Emby has a recommended naming structure that involves folders. That’s what we all have followed. So why change the way these folders are handled now? It seems backwards.