Metadata Organization?

[nmkaufman 50]

Pardon my ignorance, but is there a reason the metadata (when stored within Emby) can't be organized in a more 'user friendly' way?

 

I've been storing my metadata, images and subtitles alongside the media for years, but after moving Emby to a low-power dedicated sever, populating the UI takes a very long time.

 

I'd like to have the metadata consolidated on the OS NVME (rather than spanned across 9 mechanical disks,) but it seems like once metadata is stored inside Emby, it's really not possible to retrieve it again, since it's organized in a very unfriendly way.

 

I'm guessing there's a reason for all of this, I'm just wondering why, exactly, the metadata/images can't still be organized in hierarchical TV show > season > episode format, like they are when they're stored with the media files themselves?

[Luke 42086]

Hi, does the internal format really matter? It could just as well be hidden in the database and then you wouldn't be able to see any of it without a sqlite viewer.

[nmkaufman 50]

Only because it would be nice to have the option to retrieve the metadata, one day.

[Luke 42086]

Using names for the organization is not ideal because we have to deal with things like invalid file name characters. Even matching your media file names isn't guaranteed to work if the media is stored on another device running another operating system. They will have different rules. The metadata can be retrieved, it just will require building a tool to look the Id's up in the database.

[nmkaufman 50]

That makes sense.

 

I won't be changing anything, for now, but if there's ever a way to import / export the metadata to / from the media folders, I'd definitely be interested.