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, divx, wmv, mpg, mpeg, mkv, ifo, m2ts, mp4, m4v, mov, webm, iso. 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, and take out rows you will never want with Remove from list — the files on disk are not touched.
- 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. |
| Show only new files | On by default: files that are already in the collection are hidden from the list as soon as the scan ends, so a repeat scan offers only what is new and nothing is added twice. The status line says how many were hidden; untick the box to see them again. |
| 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.
Disc images
An .iso image of a DVD or a Blu-ray is read like a disc: duration, audio tracks and subtitles come from inside the image, which does not have to be mounted — images on a NAS or a network share work too. See Adding a DVD or Blu-ray disc.
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. |
| Movies with missing files… | 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.