Some Help on Media Sorting With Genres vs Tags

[snowypete 5]

I've started going through cleaning up my media collection. My collections all fairly well organised in folders off the main line i.e Movies>Zombies Movies>Vampire etc. I've noticed there's a lot of random crap tags in the metadata from iMDB /tMDB (like buddy movie, witchy poo's, biotope, lincoln nabraska). All useless from my point of view to find a random movie. So I started cleaning up some of these....one by one . I've made some headway to sorting but one thing that’s come up is Genre or Tag?

While there's a general consensus that there's about 11 "proper" genres - Action, Adventure, Comedy, Crime etc etc, what do you do with the sub genres? Like Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies, Superheo etc? I started adding in these sub-genres as their own and quickly realised it was getting out of hand with multiple similar genres - like Australia, Aussie, Ozploitation etc. So I cut it back to one main Ozploitation with a Tag Aussie as well. But then when I came to a Genre of Animals with a Tag for subs like Dogs, Cats, Pigs then Werewolf shouldn't technically be it's own Genre but rather Animals with a Tag of Werewolf . So now a Genre of Vampires or Mummy doesn't really fit either with that logic.

So I guess my question is - How are you guys using the Genre and Tags within Emby to help sort your collections?

And is there a way to do bulk Genre and Tag edits? (And BTW - I tried the "Bulky Editor" and "Genre Cleaner" plugins without much luck)

I'm leaning more towards keeping the main genres (with maybe a couple of extra's) and everything else as Tags like

- Genre: Crime Tags: Gangster, Mafia, Robbery, Assassin

- Genre: Horror Tags: Vampire, Werewolf, Mummy, Halloween etc

- Genre: Fantasy: Tag: Time Travel

- Genre: Space Tag: Astronaut, Start Wars, Space Invasion

[Luke 42814]

Hi, just to be clear Emby doesn’t import those tags from Internet providers. You must have had other software create nfo files containing them.

[snowypete 5]

19 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, just to be clear Emby doesn’t import those tags from Internet providers. You must have had other software create nfo files containing them.

It's quite possible that’s what happened . I know these movies that have random Tag words in them are pretty old movies from years ago (pre 2022). One goes back as far as 2016 last modified (which would have been when I started setting up Emby). Both IMDB and TMDB certainly has keywords which match up and have probably been imported somehow as Tags. Although I haven't used a metadata program is years either (or for very long) as they rarely gave the results I was after without considerable manual input anyway. Maybe I tried a plugin too at one stage? Dunno.

[Luke 42814]

Quote

One goes back as far as 2016 last modified

If it's that old it could have been Emby, although most likely not. We did do this very, very briefly before user feedback forced us to remove it.

[Luke 42814]

The genre cleaner will be your best bet to clean them up. If you don't think you're having luck with it. then let's look at why.

[snowypete 5]

12 hours ago, Luke said:

If it's that old it could have been Emby, although most likely not. We did do this very, very briefly before user feedback forced us to remove it.

There's probably only a handful in my collection that are like this. No biggy to update them manually and remove the tags.

12 hours ago, Luke said:

The genre cleaner will be your best bet to clean them up. If you don't think you're having luck with it. then let's look at why.

From what I can see, genre cleaner merges Genres i.e it can map Sci-Fi, Sci Fi to Science Fiction etc and can restrict any genre not defined in it's collection list. I won't be able to use it to merge my own custom genres into tags (although this would be a nice additional feature for the plugin?). I still want to be able to use tags for certain styles of movies (like werewolf, vampires, time travel etc), instead of having them as a main genre.

With Bulky Editor, I've worked out that I can indeed search for genres and tags. However, multi edit seems to be broken at the moment and no matter what option you choose, you get the single page edit (I also put a post in the Bulky thread alerting about the issue).

[Luke 42814]

Right ok yes. I guess if there was a tag cleaner, then that would help.

[snowypete 5]

Well not just a tag cleaner, but transferring or converting Genre's to Tags and maybe visa versa

[Luke 42814]

On 7/9/2026 at 9:16 PM, snowypete said:

Well not just a tag cleaner, but transferring or converting Genre's to Tags and maybe visa versa

Yes makes sense.