Media Library Organizer

Overview

Systematically clean, merge, rename, and verify media libraries so that Jellyfin/Emby/Plex can correctly identify and scrape all content.

When to Use

• Media directory has messy folder names with encoding info
• Same show scattered across multiple folders
• Junk files wasting space
• Need to verify episode completeness against TMDB

Workflow

digraph media_org {
  rankdir=TB;
  "1. Scan & Analyze" -> "2. Clean Junk";
  "2. Clean Junk" -> "3. Identify Duplicates";
  "3. Identify Duplicates" -> "4. Merge Scattered Episodes";
  "4. Merge Scattered Episodes" -> "5. Normalize Folder Names";
  "5. Normalize Folder Names" -> "6. Verify vs TMDB";
  "6. Verify vs TMDB" -> "7. Report & Confirm Deletion";
}

Steps

Each step has detailed instructions and reusable scripts:

1. Scan & Analyze - Survey directory, identify issues, generate report
   • Script: scripts/scan-media.sh
2. Clean Junk - Remove temp files, empty dirs, orphan fragments
3. Identify Duplicates - Find same content across folders by title/year matching
4. Merge Scattered Episodes - Combine split episodes into one folder
   • Script: scripts/check-episodes.sh
5. Normalize Folder Names - Rename to Title (Year) format
   • Script: scripts/normalize-names.sh
6. Verify vs TMDB - Compare local episode count against TMDB
7. Report & Confirm - Present findings, wait for user confirmation

Common Mistakes

Mistake	Fix
Renaming folders breaks PT/BT seeding	Confirm with user if they're still seeding
Gap detection only checks internal gaps	Must compare against TMDB total count
macOS grep lacks -P flag	Use egrep -o instead of grep -oP
sed with multi-line input fails on macOS	Use awk for complex text processing
Merging without checking overlaps	Always verify no episode overlap before merge
Guessing Chinese titles from English	Search TMDB/MyDramaList for authoritative names
Movie in TV folder or vice versa	Check if content is film or series before placing