Thumbails for offline collections

[a11an 2]

Hi all,

I’ve recently moved back to Emby from Jellyfin, mainly because I found collection management in Jellyfin a bit buggy. I’m really impressed with how well Emby picked up my library — all of my collections were detected perfectly.

For context, I don’t use any scrapers at all; everything is managed via local .nfo files.

I do have one question though:
Is Emby able to automatically pick up collection thumbnails and artwork from local files?

At the moment, it looks like I have to add the collection images manually. I’ve got around 40 collections, which I can do by hand if needed, but it would be great if there’s a setting or naming tweak that would allow Emby to pick them all up automatically.

Each movie’s movie.nfo includes the collection set information like this:

<set> <name>Some Movie Collection</name> </set> 

I also have a collection XML file set up as follows:

<Item> <ContentRating></ContentRating> <Overview>A description</Overview> <LocalTitle>Some Movie Collection</LocalTitle> </Item> 

This is the folder structure I’m using for a typical movie collection (boxset):

Some Movie Collection [boxset]
- folder.jpg        (ignored)
- fanart.jpg        (ignored)
- logo.png          (ignored)
- collection.xml    (ignored)
- Example Movie 1
  - Example Movie.mp4
  - movie.nfo
  - folder.jpg
  - fanart.jpg
- Example Movie 2
  - ...

The movies themselves are detected and grouped into collections correctly, but the collection-level artwork appears to be ignored unless I add it manually via the UI.

Sorry if this has been asked before — I’ve searched around but haven’t been able to find a clear answer.

Thanks in advance!

[Luke 42623]

@sa2000

[sa2000 784]

@a11an  I have looked into having preset collections custom images and whilst we do not have functionality to pick images for collections automatically from a folder structure as you gave

On 20/12/2025 at 15:15, a11an said:

Some Movie Collection [boxset]
- folder.jpg        (ignored)
- fanart.jpg        (ignored)
- logo.png          (ignored)
- collection.xml    (ignored)
- Example Movie 1
  - Example Movie.mp4
  - movie.nfo
  - folder.jpg
  - fanart.jpg
- Example Movie 2

But I managed to get it to work and pick my custom images for the collections

So for each movie, the nfo would have the collection name defined with different variations possible - either with a tmdbid for the collection or without

I am going to use examples I had from other users 

This one with a tmdbid of 661028 for the collection

  <set tmdbcolid="661028">
    <name>Pokémon Best Wishes! Collection</name>
  </set>

and this one is an example where there is not a tmdbid

  <set>
    <name>Blaxploitation Classics Vol. 1</name>
  </set>

Then you would create a folder for each collection named either with a tmdbid or without, depending how the set was defined

So for these 2 examples, I would have folders for the collection images and collection.nfo named like this

Blaxploitation Classics Vol. 1

and

Pokémon Best Wishes! Collection-tmdb-661028

In these folders i have files like:

poster.jpg, collection.nfo 

These collection named folders need to be copied into the metadata\collections folder under the Emby Server Data Folder

Having a pre-existing collection folder there may change the timing when adding media / scanning / refreshing - so there may be some odd issues that crop up as this is not the normal way for collections to be created

 

Edited 1 hour ago by sa2000