[tonyrulez]

Problem: For future proofing, backup and several other reasons it's good to have local information (nfo, artwork) saved for your media, either be it exported by KODI or scraped manually with a 3rd party app like Ember Media Manager. However this leaves your media library folder cluttered with nfo and jpg files, 2-3 or even more times as much files generated as you have video files. Navigating through the file system is painstaking.

On Windows this could be solved by hiding all these files with applying the hidden attribute.
Unfortunately KODI cannot scrape hidden files.

Suggestion: allow hidden metadata files to be scraped by KODI.

[PatK]

Suggestion: allow hidden metadata files to be scraped by KODI.

Interesting, but impractical given cross platform. If each movie and it's associated meta-data is located in a folder of it's own name, then navigation would be much cleaner.

[tonyrulez]

Interesting, but impractical given cross platform. If each movie and it's associated meta-data is located in a folder of it's own name, then navigation would be much cleaner.

No, you are correct, every media is located in it's own folder with it's own name. However there are also TV shows, nut just movies! A TV show season has around 20 episodes. Without metadata, it's 20 video files. With metadata, it's 60 files, because each episode has it's own nfo and jpg. That's my problem.
Could also work cross platform. On Linux .filename is hidden, just like the .actors folder. For some reason other folders and files are not hidden. Enabling hidden metadata to be scraped by KODI could work on Windows and Linux too.

[PatK]

20 video files. With metadata, it's 60 files

I rarely enter TV sub folders, usually no need unless I'm adding subtitles or such. I do get your view point and to some extant agree; hiding folders using the . prefix would likely affect users that have chosen to hide data from the scrapers and likely be a nightmare to implement considering scrapers are 3rd party creations. This was something that was talked about in the distant past (likely the conversations may be revisited in the forum); then there's the issue of o/s that do not respect these flags. If it was an easy fix, chances are good we would have seen an add-on by now, perhaps someone will take up the challenge?

[Klojum]

However this leaves your media library folder cluttered with nfo and jpg files, 2-3 or even more times as much files generated as you have video files. Navigating through the file system is painstaking.

How does this work for you with your other computer files, such your personal documents or installed applications & games? Are you hiding certain files as well to avoid clutter?

Sorry, but using Kodi itself is mainly done via its database, and no files are typically shown on-screen during 'normal' usage. If you want all the goodies in Kodi in terms of extra fanart, there will be extra files involved. Creating aesthetically pleasing folder contents is not on Kodi's agenda.

Clutter from nfo is avoidable: make proper backups of your video/music database files, and keep them in a safe location. You just won't have an alternate backup of the metadata.
Clutter from jpg is avoidable: delete the jpg files when all fanart is placed into Kodi's cache. You just won't have an original but a compressed / lower quality version of them.

Personally I find complaining about cluttering computer files pretty insignificant.

[tonyrulez]

How does this work for you with your other computer files, such your personal documents or installed applications & games? Are you hiding certain files as well to avoid clutter?

I don't enter installed application and games folder since they haven icon in the Start menu / desktop or an entry in the game launcher. And my personal documents are well organized.
However video files are not used only in KODI. I share the folders on SMB with other family members who don't really want to use KODI. They are perfectly fine watching the video file in their preferred desktop video player. This is how they have to navigate: https://i.vgy.me/FAnqdu.png

Deleting jpg because it's already in cahce? That's no backup. They are all in the folder so if I need to deploy an other KODI instance, I can immediately scrape it from there.
I use nfo and jpg because once a TV show concludes I use Ember Media Manager to scrape the metadata. Once it's done, it will stay that way forever. I had plenty of problems with TVDB an TMDB changing episode order after 10-20 years of their air datea. So I said no thanks, I wil do it myself.

[Grunthos]

I'd love to see some form of this; my suggestion here was to allow local overrides of such things as the kind of show (movie or tv) contained in a folder, or details of the media for those things that always scrape incorrectly.

Something akin to local .htaccess files that give the scraper hints and/or tell it exactly what's in the folder.

[tonyrulez]

Found a workaround, but it's a bit of a stretch calling it that. Jellyfin does support hidden metadata and pulls every information from local even when they are hidden. Then I can use the Jellyfin addon to pull metadata from there.

[jbinkley60]

Found a workaround, but it's a bit of a stretch calling it that. Jellyfin does support hidden metadata and pulls every information from local even when they are hidden. Then I can use the Jellyfin addon to pull metadata from there.

Mezzmo, another uPNP solution will centralize your metadata, artwork and similar and leave your library folders clean while updating the Kodi database.  It too, like Jellyfin, is a bit of a different approach vs. hiding the files but does offer quite a few other benefits.  


Jeff

[jjd-uk]

I assume you're talking about navigating through the files node, in which you can exclude anything you like from being listed in the gui via this advanced setting https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings....romlisting