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#1 2008-06-26 23:02:39

Berticus
Member
Registered: 2008-06-11
Posts: 731

How do you organize your media files?

Currently in Gentoo, I use Nautilus as my file manager. Been thinking about installing PCManFM for Arch. But anyway, I've got a little under 1000 full length movies, and I anticipate my collection to grow. Back when I had under 500 movies, I stuffed them all in one directory, ~/Movies. However, I noticed that going to that directory in Nautilus took some time to display its contents with ext3. So I started to think about a new organization system. I was thinking about organizing them alphabetically since it seemed so obvious. But then I realized I don't have a need to organize my movies alphabetically, whenever I looked in my ~/Movies directory, I always had an idea of what I wanted to watch, but didn't know what. So I would look at the movie titles and determined whether it fit my mood or not, so it prompted me to organize my movies by genre. However, some genres grow more than others, like 80 Action films, 71 Drama films, 4 Documentaries and 6 Sensual films.

So the roots of the problems are either I'm giving each film the wrong genre, in which case I would ask how do I determine the genre of the films (but I would still have more of one genre since it's a natural preference), or the whole taxonomy is incorrect and I need to find a new way to organize my movies based on how I feel. Of course the issue with genre is a lot of movies have multiple genres.

Anyway, here are my current genres:

Action
Adventure
Animated
Chick Flick
Comedy
Comic
Disney
Documentary
Drama
Foreign
Harry Potter
James Bond
Musical
Sensual
Star Wars
Thriller

Not sure what other genres I should include. How do others organize their movies?

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#2 2008-06-26 23:11:54

Vintendo
Member
From: Netherlands
Registered: 2008-04-21
Posts: 375
Website

Re: How do you organize your media files?

I don't have a lot of music so i just have in two seperate folders. High Defenition and Standard Defenition. I do have a lot of tv schows. I have them catogorized by show and season, like: Tv-shows/Series-Title/Season\ X/. I do have to organize my music, but that is going to be a pain:(

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#3 2008-06-26 23:13:41

chimeric
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From: Munich, Germany
Registered: 2007-10-07
Posts: 254
Website

Re: How do you organize your media files?

I don't have that many movies tongue so at the moment I just have:

  - video/movies
  - video/series
  - videa/anime

however, with such a big collection as yours it might be useful to also use the year or the decade the movies came out, like:

  - <decade>/genre/<movie>

I think that's what I'd do.

PS (didn't knew that "Harry Potter" would count as genre big_smile)

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#4 2008-06-26 23:21:31

moljac024
Member
From: Serbia
Registered: 2008-01-29
Posts: 2,676

Re: How do you organize your media files?

chimeric wrote:

PS (didn't knew that "Harry Potter" would count as genre big_smile)

Yea, that's silly, I mean I can understand Star Wars wink and maybe even James Bond but Harry Potter ? tongue

Anyway, how did you amass such a huge collection of movies ? big_smile


The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
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#5 2008-06-26 23:27:16

chimeric
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From: Munich, Germany
Registered: 2007-10-07
Posts: 254
Website

Re: How do you organize your media files?

moljac024 wrote:
chimeric wrote:

PS (didn't knew that "Harry Potter" would count as genre big_smile)

Yea, that's silly, I mean I can understand Star Wars wink and maybe even James Bond but Harry Potter ? tongue

Well, ok, Star Wars is debatable, but IMHO James Bond with 22 movies about one and the same bad guys chasing womanizer could be called a genre of its own lol.

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#6 2008-06-27 00:34:19

Berticus
Member
Registered: 2008-06-11
Posts: 731

Re: How do you organize your media files?

Series longer than 3 movies tend to get their own directory. So far what I've done is, if I can group some movies together and it amounts to 4 or more, they get their own directory. So When The Hobbit comes out, Tolkein will get his own directory. If another Terminator movie comes out, it will get its own directory. Same with the Ocean, Mission Impossible, Matrix, and a bunch of series that's only made it to three so far. Indiana Jones will get it's own directory same with Rambo. Disney movies will be the exception to this rule though. If a POTC IV ever came out, I'd still stick it in the Disney directory. I suppose if I get enough series, I'll have to make a subdirectory ~/Movies/Series

For tv shows, I do the same thing. ~/Shows/TV Show/Season/Episode. At one point the size of my tv shows exceeded the size of my movies.

For music I have: ~/Musica/Artist/Album/track number - song.

I suppose I could do it by decade (years would split up too many movie series or create too many exceptions).

"moljac0024 wrote:

Anyway, how did you amass such a huge collection of movies ? big_smile

http://torrentfreak.com/purdue-universi … aa-080415/

Officially we only support the sharing of lots and lots of Linux distro iso's and clip art and there's a statement about how illegally sharing files is discouraged.

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#7 2008-06-27 00:37:47

prasetyams
Member
From: Jakarta
Registered: 2008-04-29
Posts: 74

Re: How do you organize your media files?

I don't have that big a collection, so I just categorize them by dates, ie. put them in folders like "2007" "2008" and so on. I'm looking for a tag-based file manager or indexer of some kind, any idea? I'd like to search through files by tags, is there such a thing in Linux? (Sorry, another question.. tongue)


Where's my sig?

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#8 2008-06-27 00:45:54

emphire
Member
From: Canada
Registered: 2007-03-21
Posts: 203

Re: How do you organize your media files?

There's always the Dewey Decimal System or you could look at some common hash functionswink  You could also look at how movie rental places organize their music... I'm sure some of the larger ones have spent some time researching different ways of organizing them.

I would tend to worry more about keeping them organized in categories that are meaningful to you than finding categories that distribute the movies evenly.  Keep in mind that you'll probably be changing it again later when you get more movies (unless you over-design it now and have tons of empty categories and sub-categories).

Have you considered using a database so you can 'tag' your movies?

With my Music, I go with <genre>/<artist>/<album>.  I'm thinking a database is a better way to go, since a lot of albums have more than one artist and a lot of artists have more than one genre.  I think you might run into movies that fit multiple genres too.

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#9 2008-06-27 00:57:43

Berticus
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Registered: 2008-06-11
Posts: 731

Re: How do you organize your media files?

Yeah, there's a bunch of programs such as Griffith, Tellico, GCStar, aviManager, vMovieDB and many more.

I opted not to use these because I think having a database is redundant. If you're going to use them, most likely you'll have them organized in a certain way so that you can skim through them more efficiently. However, I realized if I just organize them the same way I don't need the extra program nor would I need a redundant database.

Essentially the same reason I stopped using a jukebox. Database was redundant, and I have it organized in a way I can quickly go through my music.

Edited after emphire's contribution
Didn't think of using the Dewey system. I have thought about how movie rental places organize their movies. The only way they do it is by genre, which is how I do it. I haven't been to a movie rental store in a very long time. If I want to get a DVD, I'll hope over to the library. Where I live, there's a network of libraries available to the public, much like how universities network their libraries.

The reason I'm seeking a new taxonomy is because some directories are starting to lag due to the amount of movies they contain. Again, this is only an issue with Nautilus, as I haven't tried other file managers.

Last edited by Berticus (2008-06-27 01:03:15)

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#10 2008-06-27 03:00:09

slackhack
Member
Registered: 2004-06-30
Posts: 738

Re: How do you organize your media files?

i just keep everything stored in /mnt/torrents.

oops :=0

j/k big_smile

I agree with just keeping it organized by categories. if one directory gets too overloaded, just make another directory to split things up:

Action
Action2
Drama
Drama2

etc.

also a lot of your categories seem redundant or necessarily restricted. you could maybe consolidate some or make subdirectories within the main directories to keep things from getting out of control. e.g.: Comedy and Comic seem kind of similar and could maybe be merged. or maybe Foreign could be a subdir of something else if you don't have a lot of foreign,  star wars, harry potter, disney and the like could all go in a directory "sci-fi" or "fantasy," etc. james bond could be a sub of "action" or "adventure,"  and so on. that way you don't have one huge directory like drama with 400 movies in it, and "star wars" hanging out at the same directory level with only 5 or 6. it just makes things seem more organized I think when you have a good balance.

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#11 2008-06-27 13:09:17

Berticus
Member
Registered: 2008-06-11
Posts: 731

Re: How do you organize your media files?

Comedy - something funny. Movies such as 40-Yeard-Old Virgin, Employee of the Month, Airplane, Ferris Bueller's Day Off belong in here.
Comic - the new phenomenon to hit the theaters where there are movie adaptation to comic books/graphic novels. Movies such as Spiderman, 300, Sin City, Batman Begins belong in here. Doubt they would be considered a comedy...

I was thinking about a fantasy movie subdirectory to put the harry potter and other movies in. I don't have a lot of sci-fi though. Just the Star Wars series and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sci-fi isn't really my kind of genre, so it would be considerably lacking.

The thing I don't like about making a Action1 Action2 directory is having to distinguish which directory to use when I have to sort through it. I don't really like the idea of having an overflow directory.

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#12 2008-06-27 15:53:28

slackhack
Member
Registered: 2004-06-30
Posts: 738

Re: How do you organize your media files?

I wondered if comic meant something else. at first I thought it meant like a chris rock standup movie, richard pryor, etc. but yeah I can see how batman, etc. wouldn't be comedy. wink

Other than give these general types of suggestions (sort by genres, merge related subjects, etc.) I don't think anyone can really tell you how to organize your files, especially without even knowing what they are. I think you just have to work it the way it feels the most natural and works best for you.

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#13 2008-06-27 16:08:44

arkay
Member
Registered: 2008-05-23
Posts: 79

Re: How do you organize your media files?

I think the way you have it is the way to go.  You just need to subcategorise a little more.

Take Star Wars for instance.  You could have a structure such as /Movies/Sci-Fi/Star Wars with each of the 6 in that directory.  Most categories that have a large amount of movies likely have groupings of movies.  The matrix is another and Bond too.

I've got mine split into Children and Adult as well.  So both directories have each of the categories as well.  Except there's no xxx in their collections lol

So Adult/Sci-Fi is different to Children/Sci-Fi.

Where I have childrens movies that are family movies and hence need to be in both Adult and Children directories I use symlinks to link it in to where it belongs.

You could if you wanted too put everything in one big movies folder and use symlinks in the category folders.  I'd think it might search faster that way.  Be worth a try.

You might just want to look into a different filesystem and/or filemanager as well.  XFS is reportedly great for directories with large files.

Cheers,

Arkay.

Last edited by arkay (2008-06-27 16:10:18)

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#14 2008-06-27 16:22:55

Berticus
Member
Registered: 2008-06-11
Posts: 731

Re: How do you organize your media files?

yeah, since I'm moving to Arch and decided I would give up trying to get Windows to access a LVM2 ext3 file system, So now I'm doing an LVM2 XFS file system for all of my movies.

I've only had to search for a movie once. I didn't know whether or not I had I Am Legend, so I issued:

find ~/Movies -iname "I Am Legend.avi"

Since I thought it could be in either thriller or action (turns out it's in thilller). Searching all of that actually took less than 30 seconds I believe. It went through the whole thing because it turned out I Am Legend was actually in an mkv container...

The children's movie vs. adult movies are something I'll look into when/if I have children. But definitely having the ability to split up movies into those categories would drastically reduce the size of each genre.

Hmm... Maybe I should group all movies that have sequels...

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#15 2008-06-27 16:37:30

moljac024
Member
From: Serbia
Registered: 2008-01-29
Posts: 2,676

Re: How do you organize your media files?

You might like GCStar, a collection manager, it's in community

 $  pacman -Ss gcstar
community/gcstar 1.4.0-1
    A collection management application

The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But if they tell you that I've lost my mind, maybe it's not gone just a little hard to find...

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#16 2008-06-27 19:51:32

brynjolf
Member
From: Sweden
Registered: 2008-05-25
Posts: 63

Re: How do you organize your media files?

or nepomuk in KDE4, could tag your files and organize them by size or something simple like that but tag the files with nepomuk through some script etc.


Cerebral: "Welcome to the distro.  You'll never leave.  Mwahaha"

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#17 2008-06-27 23:30:30

Berticus
Member
Registered: 2008-06-11
Posts: 731

Re: How do you organize your media files?

As I said I'd rather not go through the redundancy of databasing things that don't really need databasing. Unless there's some sort of major advantage I'm overlooking.

brynjolf, I don't use KDE apps. Actually my UI of choice is xmonad.

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#18 2008-06-28 01:34:04

arkay
Member
Registered: 2008-05-23
Posts: 79

Re: How do you organize your media files?

Berticus wrote:

yeah, since I'm moving to Arch and decided I would give up trying to get Windows to access a LVM2 ext3 file system, So now I'm doing an LVM2 XFS file system for all of my movies.

I've only had to search for a movie once. I didn't know whether or not I had I Am Legend, so I issued:

find ~/Movies -iname "I Am Legend.avi"

Since I thought it could be in either thriller or action (turns out it's in thilller). Searching all of that actually took less than 30 seconds I believe. It went through the whole thing because it turned out I Am Legend was actually in an mkv container...

The children's movie vs. adult movies are something I'll look into when/if I have children. But definitely having the ability to split up movies into those categories would drastically reduce the size of each genre.

Hmm... Maybe I should group all movies that have sequels...

Hehe.. Don't go and have children just so you can get more categories for your movies smile 

Cheers,

Arkay

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#19 2008-10-10 01:41:33

ZenMystic
Member
Registered: 2008-08-25
Posts: 25

Re: How do you organize your media files?

SQLite3 database is what I use, but I would not trust a hard drive with my movie collection. I hope you have backups. I use those 240 disc boxes and colour code the handle with electrical tape - 001-240 red, 001-240 green, and so on. Make fields in in your database for disc number and colour. In your case you could make fields for genre and simply enter a 'y'. This way you could search, e.g. 'documentary = y', to get a listing, and then open the movie of your choice off your hard drive. The hard drive could be folders a, b, c, etc.

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#20 2008-10-10 02:55:58

molom
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-01-21
Posts: 264
Website

Re: How do you organize your media files?

If I had that many movies I would make:
~/Movies
~/Series

Then in each one I would have a letter folder because it will not take so long for the list to load this way. Eg:
~/Movies/0-9
~/Movies/A
~/Movies/B
~/Movies/C
etc

And in the series folder I would just have a folder for each show and a folder within each show according to the Season it is. Eg.
~/Series/South Park/S1
~/Series/King of the Hill/S1
~/Series/Chasers War on Everything/S1
~/Series/Newstopia/S1

I find that to be the best way. Even though you believe it isn't like you mentioned. If you don't know what you want to watch, get a movie organiser, the only one I can think of ATM is Banshee, but I've seen other better ones.

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