Movies - Organizing a largish movie collection

Organizing a local storage based movie collection. At a high level it involves:

• Prepare movie metadata
• Renaming and folder arrangement
• Manage movies in Kodi

Prepare movie metadata

• Use TinyMediaManager i.e tmm for metadata management

• Step 1: Prepare source folders:

  • Import local movie paths
    • These are called as sources in tmm.
    • Add these via settings
  • Clean duplicates
  • Manage multi file movies
    • Naming convention is important.
    • Files should end with -cd1, -cd2, etc or -part1, -part2, etc.
  • Bulk Subtitles find and download is generally a bad idea.
    • Lot of inaccuracies in downloads.
    • Better do this one by one and before any renaming of files.

• Step 2: Scrape metadata

  • Generally prefer Kodi format metadata (nfo) files. tmm provides option for this in the setting.
  • IMDb vs TMDb metadata
    • IMDb scrapping generally is slow for bulk operations
    • TMDb provides a good source for movie metadata and most of it (including fan art and posters) can be downloaded from here.
    • I prefer rating from IMDb. There is an option to select just ratings from IMDb in tmm
  • I would recommend doing a two pass metadata search
    • In the first pass do a bulk operation using TMDb scrapper. This can include TMDb ratings.
    • Once all metadata is downloaded a second bulk search can be done just for ratings and top 250 data using IMDb.

Renaming and folder arrangement

• This step move movies to a Kodi recommended structure using tmm.
• CAUTION Once renaming is complete it cannot be undone. Verify each and every thing before doing renaming.
• Recommended folder structure is movie-name (year). Generally prefer a flat structure over sub-directories and deep hierarchies.
• General preference for file names is same as folder name.
  • I personally prefer movie-name (year) video-resolution imdb-rating part-no.
• Once folder name and file name preferences are set in Settings->Movies->Renamer, do a dry run to see the changes that tmm is going to do.
• Verify the dry run result carefully. Adjust settings if something seems weird.
• Execute rename once verified.

Manage movies in Kodi

• Install Kodi on your laptop/desktop/tv.
• Import the media folder created using tmm above in Kodi media manager.
• As a general setting enable Update library on startup.
• Cleaning DB in Kodi is a bit of a pain. Avoid folder/movie path changes.
  • Keep running clean library even for smaller changes done to files/folders.
• Periodically i.e once you have watched enough movies you may want to do a export library. This writes watched status and any extra info in Kodi to .nfo files in source.