Undo - Save Artwork into Media Folders

[achalmers 3]

Hi!  I recently recovered from a bad VM and rebuilt Emby onto a new Linux VM.  I am posting in the "General" section because I feel like this is more of a generic question then a Linux specific question.  Upon rebuilding I guess I accidentally selected "Save Artwork into Media Folders".   Well.....now my network share has thousands of small files in it because until probably about 2 years ago I was just dumping MKV's into a share.  Nowdays I create new folder for each movie etc.  Anyway - I have a network share with thousands of small files and although I dont notice a performance issue (my network storage is very fast) I would rather it not be this way.  

Is there a clean way to "undo" this?  Get the artwork back onto the server metadata folder / delete from the network share?  If not what if I create folders for each movie and re-scan what will Emby do?  Looking for suggestions.  Maybe I should just leave it be but my OCD is bothering me and I feel like thousands of files on the root of the network share isn't best practice.  

[Apotropaic 42]

It really depends on how much media you have. Firstly, yes I would recommend putting everything into their own dedicated folder and just moving the associated metadata into them (.nfo and art). It is just a cosmetic thing.

It’s up to you if you want untick the save artwork option but I prefer having it all there in case in the future I need to rebuild my library so emby doesn’t have to download everything again, as well keeping all my custom art I’ve picked.

I’d then run an emby library rescan which will just identify that the media has moved, all your watched statuses should remain.

Whether you remove all these files is up to you, depending on your OS you can use the CLI to do this quite easily based on how brave you are

If you do remove them then you ‘may’ need to refresh the metadata for the library, I’ve never stored my media this way so I don’t know from experience.