Scanning a drive for movies
The fastest way to catalog a drive full of video files: point the program at a folder and it finds everything, works out the titles from the file and folder names, recognizes series, and looks the details up online.
, or Ctrl+Q.
Scanning
- Choose the disk or folder to scan. Subfolders are included.
- The program collects everything matching
File name extensions to search for — by default
avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, mkv, ifo, m2ts, mp4. Edit the list and press Enter to scan again. - The result is a tree of what it found, with the titles it worked out. Correct anything odd, untick what you do not want, delete rows you will never want.
- Press Add movies.
Getting sensible titles out of file names
| Get movie title from | File name or folder name. Folder name is right for collections organized as one folder per film; file name for a flat folder. |
| Replace underscores with space | Turns The_Big_Lebowski into something a search engine will recognize. |
| Skip samples and trailers | Leaves out the little files that come with downloads. |
| Add one file from each folder only | For films split into parts: one card instead of five. |
| Remove existing | Drops from the list everything that is already in the collection, so a repeat scan adds only what is new. |
| Add movie titles only | No online lookup: titles and file paths go in, nothing else. Fast, and the details can be filled in later with Batch updating movie details. |
| Set the “date added” to the file creation date | So that reflects when the film actually appeared, not when you catalogued it. |
Series
When the file names look like episodes — S02E05, 2x05, a Season 2 folder — the scanner groups them: one movie card for the series with a tree of seasons and episodes underneath, instead of two hundred separate films. Episodes whose titles are not in the file names get a placeholder that the online lookup replaces with the real episode title.
Ungroup series in the right-click menu of the tree undoes the grouping for a branch where you would rather have separate cards. More about how series are stored is in TV series and episodes.
Keeping the catalog in step with the disk
| Perform a scan for new video files on program start | Rescans the folders you name each time the program starts and offers to add whatever appeared. Set folders chooses them. |
| Find deleted | The other direction: finds the movies whose files no longer exist and offers to delete those cards. Do not run it while the external drive is unplugged. |
Scanning is a mass operation, so it needs a licence or an active trial — see Trial, free mode and licence. Make a backup before a big scan; adding a thousand films is easy, removing them again is not.
Free to try. Catalog up to 100 movies at no cost, forever.