Recently finished setting up all the ARR services and I already had a lot of movies placed in nice folders for collections. Upon import into radarr it does not like this and fails to see most of them. I said fine and went into some of my collection folders to read the movies in there and then it complains about “Multiple root folders are missing for movie collections:” . So not only would I have to add root folders for each collection but then I have to go back through and rename each one of those to be what radarr wants them to be? Is there any way to automate this I looked through there wiki and didn’t see anything about collection making. Or do most people not put movies in actuall collection folders such as movies/Star Wars/Star Wars Episode One file
Thank you
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Or do most people not put movies in actuall collection folders such as movies/Star Wars/Star Wars Episode One file
No, I don’t think most people do that. I would wager that most people don’t even have multiple root folders. I do, but that’s only because I sort things into anime and non-anime, because I use different profiles with different custom formats to fetch each type of media.
The usual way to store media in Sonarr/Radarr is:
/root folder/movie name/movie file. You can get more complicated than that, but why would you? There’s not really any practical benefit to it, unless you’re navigating the folders by hand when you want to play something, and have a lot of media. For example, Radarr doesn’t care if you have 100 movies in individual folders in the root. It’s not a human, so it has no problem telling you which movies you are missing from each series on the Collections tab, and can fetch the remaining movies automatically.Ok thanks. I gather that now it will be much faster for me to rip out all of my ‘self made collections’ and re import everything into radarr than doing what I mentioned in my post. I went crazy with manual collections and would take hours… most movies are in
/root folder/movie/movie name/movie fileformat but some get crazy like/root folder/movie/DC/Animated/Batman/batmanMovieFolder/MovieYeah, that won’t work. You can customize a little on how Servarr apps store media, but the biggest rule is that the paths for movies must always be consistent. Get your name format set up in Media Management, then be sure to put a checkmark on the Rename Movies box before you import. Doing that will let you make sure Radarr renames everything to be more legible to you.
I recommend setting up Radar using the TRaSH guides. https://trash-guides.info/
Thanks yea I just followed that to get hard links but it did not cross my mind to change anything with old files…
If your movies are just in one big folder, there’s a Windows batch file out there called file2folder.bat
I used to have a copy, and it just takes the name of every file, creates a folder with the same name, and puts the file into it. Instead of something like c:\movies\batman.mp4 for example, you end up with c:\movies\batman\batman.mp4 which is something that Radarr can work with.
You’ll probably still need to do some tidying up and matching, but from what I remember, it’s a lot easier :)
Yeah, that .bat works really well. Makes pretty much any network access so much easier to set up and use.
I’ve found the file in one of my backups. It’s a Windows batch file, so you’d need to save it as a .bat file. The contents are:
@echo off
for %%a in (.) do (
md “%%~na” 2>nul
move “%%a” “%%~na”
)
but, I searched online first, and a lot of people now are saying to use FileBot instead, as it gives you more options:
The only reason I have multiple root folders is to differentiate between tv and anime (e.g. western and anime/japanese) productions in sonarr. Radarr has only one folder.
But I follow the arrs sorting system as the be all and end of all.
Collections are done in Jellyfin.When I started my collection I manually imported about 50 movies, 2-4 big shows and identified, tagged and then imported about 400 songs more or less manually in lidarr.
Yes this is what I have found out for some reason thought radarr would make those collections in folders for me aswell not sure why. Plex, and kometa make collections for my viewing aswell but just liked the organization of sorted folders. I have changed to the recommended layout and all is good now. Thanks :)
Radarr does manage collections but more in a management view. Files are sorted in their individual folders regardless
Or do most people not put movies in actuall collection folders
That’s possible… I mean there’s got to be people using collections the way you’re trying to use them but generally speaking media apps like Kodi / Jellyfin / Plex /etc. are scanning movies as
root folder / movie name / movie file(s) or folder
so e.g.
c:\movies\Awesome.Movie.2024\Awesome.Movie.2024.mkv
c:\movies\Awesome.Movie.2024\Awesome.Movie.complete.bluray.2024\
Would be the typical scan folder structure.
That said I don’t put stuff in collections the way you’re describing so can’t speak to how that should work but hopefully there’s others here doing collections like that to comment on that.
Worst case you may want to hop into one of the Radarr support channels to ask there, I think(?) they have Discord support.
Not sure I’ll answer your question, but I would think the root folder would be /movies so I’d double check those settings. You may have to manually specify /movies/Star wars an another root folder.
If that is all set up right, I believe the *arr apps organize media too. You may have a user/app conflict with your file structure so you’d have to do all that manually.
