I love Jellyfin. It lets me stream my favorite movies and shows anytime. No more worrying about a streaming service removing my favorite movies or shows from its library. That said, my Jellyfin media library is a huge mess. Whenever I click on the movie poster to watch it, another documentary starts. TV shows don’t display episodes in the correct order either.

Manually fixing every single file is tedious, so it adheres to the Jellyfin server’s recommendation for file organization to map metadata correctly. When I discovered the TinyMediaManager container, organizing my Jellyfin library was a game-changer. Being free for personal use, deploying it as a Docker has resolved my fights with metadata scrapers and helped me tidy up my Jellyfin media library.

What is TinyMediaManager and what does it do?

A media library management tool with a GUI​

Befriending cinephiles and co-owning some physical discs helped me build a decent library of content I enjoyed rewatching. I loaned my Band of Brothers Blu-ray set to a friend who owned a Blu-ray writer. I knew he wasn’t going to return it, so I took a digital backup. Taking digital backups over the years has left me with a chaotic file name and folder structure.

That changes with TinyMediaManager, which is a Java-based app available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Typically, it comes as a packaged installer file. However, I chose to run it as a Docker container on my home server alongside my other self-hosted apps. It took less than 5 minutes to add the existing Jellyfin media library folders to the Docker Compose file for TinyMediaManager to get it up and running.

TinyMediaManager packs an excellent GUI that helps organize TV and movie libraries with correct metadata, which helps sync with Jellyfin. So all I need to do is select a metadata provider to assign correct metadata to an entire show instead of fixing seasons or episodes at a time. And the same goes for movies, especially those with sequels or in an anthology.

Jellyfin’s built-in tools for organizing are not enough

Fixing metadata is a mess

I tried using Jellyfin to fix metadata for the Blu-ray backup of the Band of Brothers. But I had a tough time correctly mapping metadata to episodes because I kept messing up the file names. I couldn’t fix the filenames in bulk inside the Jellyfin server. And reorganizing the shows by creating folders for seasons and giving proper names to episodes was quickly getting tedious.

Thankfully, TinyMediaManager works wonderfully at identifying, scanning, and scraping metadata for all selected movies or shows. It’s pretty satisfying to have separate, granular options for searching and scraping metadata for the entire show or an episode.

Besides adding all metadata about the show, I also get to pick the artwork of my choice as the show’s poster. That’s not possible in Jellyfin as yet.

Renaming the files to the specific name format is a massive time saver. I regret not using this tool before dumping all files into the Jellyfin server. On top of that, it lets me keep the downloaded data in a separate folder before verifying and replacing all the data in my Jellyfin media library. Most importantly, no hardlinks to folders or files are necessary.

TinyMediaManager shines with its bulk operations

Solving the wrong posters and metadata woes

One of the most significant problems with my Jellyfin library was inconsistent file names because I had collected them over the years. That’s why Jellyfin struggled to find the correct years and their corresponding metadata. Hence, Jellyfin failed to detect some episodes (Behind the Scenes) from Band of Brothers.

So far, TinyMediaManager has worked fine, except for a few hiccups and occasional random freezes. Restarting the browser tab fixes that.

What really impressed me was the bulk operations. I can select multiple files to fetch their metadata and rename them accordingly. Besides, creating an NFO (info) file for them is possible in the same workflow. In the end, changing the metadata of multiple files and renaming them at once becomes a matter of a few clicks.

TinyMediaManager is a must for all Jellyfin users

I admit that the experience of this app on other platforms might differ. That said, it’s a small price to pay for renaming, organizing, and fixing the metadata of your media library in bulk. Once you select the metadata provider, it just works in consistent naming across files.

After using TinyMediaManager, I turned off automatic data refreshing in Jellyfin to prevent a tug-of-war between the two.

The only thing is that I need to trigger a library scan in Jellyfin manually and enable the option to replace images to ensure proper ones are used.​ Besides, you can always try out the most helpful plugins to improve your Jellyfin experience.