No option to identify movies in 4.9.1.80??

[Ronstang 293]

This gets dumber by the day.  I just created a new collection, painfully slow...everything is now slow with this new version.  But that is not the real problem.  Because of my FOLDER STRUCTURE if I add all the movies at once in a folder to a collection when you go to the collection they don't show as movies, but as folders and are separate from the other movies added individually.

So it appear I now have to turn off that setting that flattens the folders for LOOKS ONLY it appears, then click each folder to get to an individual movie, then select that movie to add to the collection.  And I have to repeat this for 35 movies, instead of how it USED TO WORK where you just multi-selected all in the folder and created a collection.

This new so called upgrade is a huge downgrade in productivity which totally negates any new features or fixes etc.  This is totally ridiculous.  Do the emby developers actually use their own product?  What a huge waste of time jumping through hoops for a change that has ABSOLUTELY NO FUNCTIONAL PURPOSE.  If it does then please illustrate.

[Ronstang 293]

OK, everything is so painfully slow now you click to add to collections and it just sits there with the spinning icon, and this is every time you click it.  And this after you had to click the folder to get to the movie, each time...THIRTY FIVE TIMES.  Everything is SLOW.  Adding these extra layers of folders to deal with is not going to force me to spend 15-20 minutes adding movies to a collection when it used to take 30 seconds.

Horribly awful is this so called update.

[Luke 42077]

58 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

OK, everything is so painfully slow now you click to add to collections and it just sits there with the spinning icon, and this is every time you click it.  And this after you had to click the folder to get to the movie, each time...THIRTY FIVE TIMES.  Everything is SLOW.  Adding these extra layers of folders to deal with is not going to force me to spend 15-20 minutes adding movies to a collection when it used to take 30 seconds.

Horribly awful is this so called update.

HI, in your user settings have you tried enabling the option called 

Auto open single items in folder view

That will eliminate a click layer for you.

[ZanderKeen 72]

3 hours ago, Luke said:

HI, in your user settings have you tried enabling the option called 

Auto open single items in folder view

That will eliminate a click layer for you.

Can this be a global setting we can enable/disable at a server level for all users rather than only a user level please? (or a way we can make it the default for all users)

Also, can the tv clients be updated to respect this setting as well?

Thanks.

[mrmixed 77]

The setting Luke refers to only addresses the extra click for the final step of actually playing a title.   For anyone that uses Folder View for both navigating/watching and doing configuration for their content, the click-through option is not good enough.

There are several active threads relating to different aspects of this change, but it's all the same issue, relating from this rather significant change in how single-title-folders are managed by the system.

 

[Ronstang 293]

3 hours ago, mrmixed said:

The setting Luke refers to only addresses the extra click for the final step of actually playing a title.   For anyone that uses Folder View for both navigating/watching and doing configuration for their content, the click-through option is not good enough.

Exactly!  I tried that and that is how I found out if you select all the files in a folder and try to create a collection, which used to be the easiest and most logical way, it still adds them as folders and changes nothing.

Everything is so slow now because I use a lot of folders and this EXTRA USELESS LAYER that has ZERO FUNCTIONALITY had made just navigating emby so slow it has become almost useless to me.

On top of that I tried to watch a movie last night on my Sony Google TV and there is no way in the display settings to skip the extra click so now I have to click the folder to get to the movie.  This annoyed me so much I just exited and watched something on Netflix.

You have essentially KILLED emby for me.  When I get back from my trip to California I will re-test Jellyfin because since I got rid of Cable TV I no longer need Premiere so it may just be time to leave this dumpster fire to those who just throw everything in a giant folder.  I simply cannot do that as I have over 10K movies and hundreds of TV series.

[Painkiller88 248]

Just as an idea

is there a way to disable CollapseSingleItemFolders using a SQL statement or via API?

So everyone would be able to turn it off for all libraries what should fix it for everyone, even the ones with old installs

 

 

[mrmixed 77]

I'm posting this here because several of the other related threads are marked as "solved" (although I disagree with that assessment), and I very much appreciate Ronstang's enthusiasm for discussing the finer impacts of this issue.

 

I figured out that I can get my folders to display in the 4.8 style if I restore my pre-upgrade backup and upon server restart, and immediately kill the scheduled tasks for "Scan media library" and "Vacuum Database" (probably only one of those tasks needs to be disabled, but at this point I am willing to trash every single service in Emby if I can get my library back to how it used to work).  I'm not sure what will happen if I try to add additional content.  I am guessing that would be perilous.

This makes a lot of sense based on the comments above and in other threads about the CollapseSingleItemFolders metadata setting. The UI is still capable of doing what I want; 4.9 just mangled the metadata to prevent it from happening.  It seems it should not be a huge effort to restore this functionality, and I'd be grateful if a dev would actually engage as to what the path forward could be for this issue, without telling me that my folders are more accurate now, and with the caveat that I'm not ever going to reorganize my folder structure to a flat filesystem.

[TRAE 5]

On 10/6/2025 at 6:21 AM, Happy2Play said:

It is to try and better represent actual folder structure as it really was never supposed to be the same as the movies tab collapsed view.

Awesome. What it accomplished was making something that I've been using fine for the better part of a decade unusable.

[Trevor68 70]

best get used to it, as someone who is still checking a radio button every single freaking time he wants to check for missing episodes I can assure you, this place does not ever revert shite decisions. it's the Emby way, or the highway. 

[Ronstang 293]

1 hour ago, TRAE said:

Awesome. What it accomplished was making something that I've been using fine for the better part of a decade unusable.

They accomplished nothing but making emby basically annoying and unusable for anyone who has a large collection and is organized.  They want you to throw all your files into one big folder for some reason.  Emby as a business confuses me because they seem to care more about doing something a certain way, even if wrong and sometimes stupid, rather than making the customers' experience the best it can be...but they sure spend a lot of time on adding little features that I consider completely useless when all I want is the core functionality to work as best as it can and this latest release makes emby painfully slow and unusable for me.  

I am starting to think emby is more of a computer nerds vanity project more than an actual business because even when things get fixed it sometimes takes forever and ever and ever.

[dakinggp33 3]

Yeah, this particular change isn't working out too well for me at all. Viewing my media through the folders tab made managing everything easier. Wish there was a way to revert on my server, but it doesn't seem so.

[halitayarci 13]

Having the same issue myself... This needs to change back to the way it used to be in my opinion... I can't give up my folder structure and create a library for every folder I have... Libraries were working as my repositories for my folders and it was working fine... If I turn every folder into a library, mainpage will be a mess without any real ability to sort or categorize... And please don't suggest using genres tab etc. We were able to make the libraries we want and view them as we wanted. I'll never understand why this had to change... I had my own sorting style... I keep films in their own folders with .nfo files and artwork and those film folders are stored under director folders or genre folders or nationality folders etc. My libraries were created using those main genre, director, nationality folders... Now all my libraries are useless and I have to define a library as "Films" and list all the titles in the same screen if I want to use any sorting capability... Also the performance is really effected too. The time it takes to open a library is at least doubled and the actor or director detail page is taking forever to open...

Edited October 10, 2025 by halitayarci

[Lacasita 2]

On 10/8/2025 at 11:29 PM, Ronstang said:

I am starting to think emby is more of a computer nerds vanity project more than an actual business because even when things get fixed it sometimes takes forever and ever and ever.

You're absolutely right...!
Don't worry, that's how it is.
They never address the needs of their users/subscribers.
It's pure progressive vanity.
We'll have to migrate to another system.
What a shame.

[halitayarci 13]

3 hours ago, Lacasita said:

You're absolutely right...!
Don't worry, that's how it is.
They never address the needs of their users/subscribers.
It's pure progressive vanity.
We'll have to migrate to another system.
What a shame.

Any suggestions? Kodi, Jellyfin and Plex are not accomplishing what I want either...

[Painkiller88 248]

11 minutes ago, halitayarci said:

Any suggestions? Kodi, Jellyfin and Plex are not accomplishing what I want either...

kodi is out of the game if you want transcoding, it is still not able to offer transcoding.

If you just use it at home for your own or in your own network you can go with kodi as there are a lot of cool plugins. I wrote a lot of them my own years ago
Jellyfin i have no idea about their status and how good they are at the moment.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, what we can also do that will help with this is give mixed content libraries a Movies & Shows tab, rather than separating them.

[mrmixed 77]

It's getting exhausting trying to keep up with so many different topics all relating to the same issue.

Cross-posting my response to "Movies & Shows":

 

[jasmine96 7]

Same here — I’ve run into the same issue after updating to 4.9.1.80.

I’ve seen the suggested workaround, but honestly it feels a bit clunky and not what we really want. We just want the original simple folder behavior back — or at least a global option that lets users choose between the new and old style.

It would be great if this setting could apply to Movies, TV Shows, Mixed Content libraries, and any other content type that uses folder view — so that the experience is consistent across all libraries.

Please consider restoring or adding this option in a future update. The old folder view worked beautifully for many of us longtime users.

[Ronstang 293]

14 hours ago, daldana said:

So we're now at beta version 4.9.2.6 and still no TVNext feature addition! Come on @Lukeand @ebr!

Did they fix this stupid folders BS that is slowing down emby for every one of my users?? I've been getting complaints.  TVNext or whatever they call it, I will believe it when I see it.

[Ronstang 293]

1 hour ago, ebr said:

In fact, one of the major features designated to 4.9 is not  yet ready so that is still taking priority.

Are you planning of fixing or at least making optional this ridiculous folder navigating issue because not only is it making emby almost unusable for me but my users are complaining about "what I did". 

[Luke 42077]

@RonstangHi, can you please describe your issue in more detail? Thanks !

[Ronstang 293]

Come on Luke, you were really reactive and helpful right before the latest stable was released so why are you going back to playing dumb when I know you are anything but?

You know exactly what I am talking about.  You added an extra USELESS layer for folders when navigating emby so now you click on a movie and you go to another folder you have to click on before you actually get to the movie.  It is useless, it provides absolutely NO FUNCTION but it creates havoc for people like me who have huge collections which have lots and lots of nested folders to keep everything organized.

It is horrible just using emby now.  For instance I have a lot of collections because I have a lot of actual Blu-Ray box sets and also a lot that have been created from TCM recordings and not just clicking on collections I have to wait 20-30 seconds PER CLICK for emby to react because of this stupid folder handling change.  And it is every time.  So if I go back to collections from a collection I have to wait.  Every single navigation is a huge wait.  

The other day I got a phone call from a family member who asked if emby was down because clicking on collections just had the churning circle of Windows death wait.  I had to explain this was the NEW emby and out of my control.  When he finally got it to load then he asked whey clicking on a MOVIE led to just another useless folder lever when it used to go right to the MOVIE.  Once again I had to explain that not only was it not my idea but out of my control.

Personally, I am so frustrated with this BS that I rarely watch movies on emby any more because I am tire of waiting for every click and having to navigate double folders for NO DAMN REASON.

Are you going to fix this, or at least make it optional? 

If not I am going to load up Jellyfin and give it a try again since I no longer need emby Premiere.

[Luke 42077]

@Ronstangdid you try setting the user profile option to auto enter single item folders? This will allow it to jump right through that extra layer.

Also did you create a previous topic about this? Thanks.

[mrmixed 77]

I know this issue is being covered in a few different posts at this point, but it is disappointing that it has been over a month and there is still no significant engagement from the devs to address the actual problem.

@Zelighas helpfully started a new post to consolidate this issue.  Please add your support there.