Unable to generate NFO files

[dwlassen 1]

I am new to Emby but have spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with the software as well as testing.

I would like to store metadata in the media folders as .nfo files, but am for the life of me unable to get this feature to work. I have:

- configured the library in question to read and write the nfo files
- ticked "Save artwork into media folders" 
- restarted the server after the config change
- modified metadata for an individual photo followed by running a metadata refresh for that item

but I am unable to see the nfo in the media folder. (I have also tried to change exporer settings to show hidden files just in case it was hidden, but no luck.) Finally I ran a search on the entire file system for "*.nfo" but not a single file was found.

Could it be inadequate folder permissions? - If so, how should I modify the permissions?

Apart from this, I am quite impressed with Emby in comparison to other products I have tested.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Edited April 7 by dwlassen

[dwlassen 1]

Hmmm - it seems that nfo files only apply to video files - I was assuming they would apply to any media item.

I guess that begs the question of how Emby handles image file renaming and/or movement of an image file to a different media folder: should it be expected that metadata will preserved in either of those scenarios?

[lorac 122]

Are you certain that you've toggled nfo to be written? You should see nfo file in the root of a series folder as well as the season folders.

if you see images then it wouldn't be a permissions issue.

For the image manipulation i'd expect a library scan would pick that up but possibly the real time monitor might as well.

[dwlassen 1]

Yup it’s all set correctly, but as mentioned I am seeing nfo’s for videos but not images, so I guess they are only supported for video files.

[Luke 42352]

Nfo's are not used with photos. What metadata do you want to save in them?

[dwlassen 1]

 

Primarily “overview” and perhaps a few others.

My concern is portability, ie the ability to move media items to different folders.

I assume if I do that e.g. data in “overview” would be lost after a metadata refresh?

thx

[Luke 42352]

For photos, yes. I think ideally we should add support to save it as embedded metadata inside the image file.

[dwlassen 1]

That would be great. 
just out of curiosity: is there any reason NFO’s are not used for image files?

[Luke 42352]

On 4/7/2026 at 7:03 PM, dwlassen said:

That would be great. 
just out of curiosity: is there any reason NFO’s are not used for image files?

It is just not something that users have talked about all that much. Plus, users could have tens of thousands of photos. When you think about how much space that would take up, how much that would pollute your photo folders, and then the amount of time that it would add to the library scan to read and write them, I think it is fair to question whether it is a good idea or not.

[dwlassen 1]

My use case looks something like this:

Emby is the family library for all videos and photos organized by year and subfolder=topic or event. There are 10s of thousands of media items. The vast majority of these have no metadata (other than "technical" metada which is not user input), but there is a very small subset that has some valuable metadata that is searchable.

The hope is that this metadata somehow can be preserved if for example the media are moved to a new folder structure or new instance of Emby.

The metadata I am talking about is descriptive, not technical.

I am thinking that this would only lead to a limited set of NFO files if they were to be supported for images and not major "pollution".

(I am assuming that an NFO file only would be created if a user manually enters metadata through Emby).

 

 

 

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 11:28 AM by dwlassen

[Neminem 1666]

Tbh it sounds like immich-app/immich: High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution.

Would be a better solution for you.

[dwlassen 1]

Don't get me wrong - Emby perfectly matches all of my requirements, and is IMHO a well architected and supported commercial product.

Despite my tech background, I have no appetite to get into GNU / open source development platforms with associated issues, troubleshooting and workarounds - it just needs to work flawlessly and deliver a great UX both of which Emby does. Another key feature that is not all that common in this space is the ability to search on folder names - one would think this is a 101 feature, but its hard to find - I moved away form Synology Photos for that reason. (Not sure where immich stands on that). Additionally there is ease of deployment: getting Emby up and running was a breeze.

The only "nice to have" feature I was hoping for was the preservation of image metadata - I just find that it would be helpful if any and all metadata would be portable, hence the discussion around NFO files. Another idea mentioned by the developer was to write metadata directly to the file itself, I an not sure though whether there is enough "space" on an image file to include lengthy descriptions as an example.

Apart from that Emby gets the job done perfectly.