How do you organize your media library?
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2026 1:10 pm
I have a few top level directories, notably
- Music
- Films
- TV
I sort my music like
Sometimes I change my albums to be named like (year) Album instead because sorting albums chronologically seems better to me, not like it really matters because modern media players can read tags.
I have no idea how to sort my non-fiction books at all. /Author/Title ? /Author/year - Title ? I've tried just throwing books in general categories and then making subcategories as too many books on a topic fill up a directory. But then there's issues of having too many subcategories or sometimes a book can belong in two different categories. Seems like tagging books in some kind of database and otherwise leaving them in /author/title format is as good as it can get.
Interested to seeing how fellow data hoards manage.
If you don't use something like Sonarr or tinyMediaManager to automatically rename and organize your animes... you really should. As an added bonus, proper media library organizers will generate metadata for your stuff which then plays nice in Kodi or Jellyfin, which you should also be using unless you consume all of your media in front of your computer and like keeping text files to record progress or you delete episodes as you work through a season (?) . (I like using Jellyfin so I can watch my stuff on tablet, projector, 3ds/vita)
Any tips for organizing books would be appreciated -- I have tried using Calibre in the past and really hated the UI but maybe it's improved. Interesting in hearing how you guys sort your stuff. You guys DO organize your media, don't you????
- Music
- Films
- TV
I sort my music like
I sort my films like/Artist/Album (year)/# - title
and my TV like/Title (year)/Title (year)
(pretty much no brainers)/Series (year)/Season #/s#e# - title
Sometimes I change my albums to be named like (year) Album instead because sorting albums chronologically seems better to me, not like it really matters because modern media players can read tags.
I have no idea how to sort my non-fiction books at all. /Author/Title ? /Author/year - Title ? I've tried just throwing books in general categories and then making subcategories as too many books on a topic fill up a directory. But then there's issues of having too many subcategories or sometimes a book can belong in two different categories. Seems like tagging books in some kind of database and otherwise leaving them in /author/title format is as good as it can get.
Interested to seeing how fellow data hoards manage.
If you don't use something like Sonarr or tinyMediaManager to automatically rename and organize your animes... you really should. As an added bonus, proper media library organizers will generate metadata for your stuff which then plays nice in Kodi or Jellyfin, which you should also be using unless you consume all of your media in front of your computer and like keeping text files to record progress or you delete episodes as you work through a season (?) . (I like using Jellyfin so I can watch my stuff on tablet, projector, 3ds/vita)
Any tips for organizing books would be appreciated -- I have tried using Calibre in the past and really hated the UI but maybe it's improved. Interesting in hearing how you guys sort your stuff. You guys DO organize your media, don't you????
