1 Introduction

For many people like me who love collecting movie and TV resources,Emby is almost the ultimate choice for a home media center: its interface is beautiful, categorization is clear, and features are rich, instantly turning local resources into a streaming-like experience.

But when the collection scale expands to thousands or tens of thousands of titles, you will find that Emby's work at the lowest level—namely,media file scraping and metadata organizing—is actually not its strongest suit.

Emby's original design intent is “display” and “playback,” not “batch management.” It can help you turn an already organized media library into a beautiful interface, but only on one condition: these files must be properly named, clearly structured, and complete with information. Otherwise, it will frequently encounter frustrating issues such as recognition errors, mismatched covers, chaotic metadata, incorrectly merged movies, and extremely slow scanning.

Especially when the total number of movies exceeds five thousand, this problem is magnified exponentially. Scanning the media library for the first time often takes ten hours or even longer, and any minor issue with naming, paths, or nfo files during the process will cause Emby to misidentify, miss scraping, or even merge hundreds of movies into a single entry.

In other words,Emby is more like a “presentation layer” rather than a “data cleaning layer.”

Therefore, if there could be a more professional tool to help Emby complete the initial organizing of the media library in advance, allowing Emby to focus on its core job of “playback and presentation”—the efficiency and stability of the entire system would be elevated to a whole new level.

And among the various solutions I have repeatedly tried, the one that satisfies me the most is an old friend I had overlooked for years:TinyMediaManager (TMM)。

TMM can complete those low-level and tedious organizing tasks before Emby steps in—automatically naming, downloading posters, matching metadata, generating nfo files, verifying actor information, unifying folder structures... allowing all media files to be “preprocessed” in a standardized format before being handed over to Emby for display.

This not only significantly reduces Emby's scanning burden but also greatly improves recognition accuracy and overall performance. For large-scale collectors, TMM is basicallyEmby's best partner: one is responsible for organizing the world initially, and the other is responsible for making the world look beautiful.

2 Starting with Scraping—The Real Advantage of TMM

1 Overview

Scraping may seem like a minor action of “pulling down movie information,” but once the scale expands to thousands or even tens of thousands of titles, it directly affects the efficiency and stability of the entire media management workflow. This chapter starts with the essence of scraping, and along the way, uses my hands-on experience to compare the performance and applicable scenarios of Emby and TinyMediaManager (TMM) under large-scale libraries.

2 What is Scraping

Definition:Scraping is the process of letting software automatically retrieve metadata for movies or TV shows from the internet—including title, year, director, actors, plot summary, posters, background images, IMDb/TMDb IDs, etc.—and writing this information into local files or databases so that the media server can correctly recognize and display them.

A typical scraping process includes:

1. Scanning files (recognizing title, year, and version information from the filename);
2. Matching databases (querying entries on TMDb/IMDb/TheTVDB);
3. Fetching metadata (downloading plot, actors, ratings, images, etc.);
4. Generating local files (.nfo, poster.jpg, fanart.jpg, etc.), which are the final products of scraping, and the media server will use them as the basis for recognition.

Scraping itself is lightweight and negligible for small media libraries, but when the collection reaches thousands or tens of thousands of titles, every step of scraping is magnified: network requests surge, the probability of matching failures rises, the cost of error correction increases, and the cost of rescanning becomes expensive. Taking my actual test as an example: letting Emby scan a “European and American Movies” library of about 10,000 titles, a complete scan + match + metadata download often takes over a dozen to more than twenty hours; once identification errors or network issues are encountered, the entire process may be forced to rerun, making the time cost extremely high.

At the same scale, TMM's scraping experience is often much faster. It is based onlocal batch processing, offers stronger control over directories and naming rules, and can complete most of the work in the “preprocessing” stage, thereby freeing media servers (such as Emby) from time-consuming scraping tasks.

3 nfo Files: The End of Scraping, and the Starting Point of the Media Library

3.1 Overview

Throughout the entire scraping process, the .nfo file is a very critical link. It records all of the video'stextual metadata—including title, year, director, actors, plot summary, genre, rating, and IDs from databases like IMDb/TMDb.

From the perspective of a scraping tool (such as TMM),generating nfo is the final result of scraping; while from the perspective of a media server (such as Emby, Jellyfin, or Plex),reading nfo is the starting point for identifying videos。

3.2 How nfo Works

When you finish scraping with TMM, a set of files will usually appear in each video directory:

movie.nfo  
poster.jpg  
fanart.jpg  

.poster.jpg

fanart.jpg

3.3 TMM Free vs. Pro Version: Differences and Practical Impact

The .nfo contains the detailed information of the video; poster.jpg and fanart.jpg correspond to the poster and background respectively. Later, when you let Emby scan the media library, it will not blindly scrape from the internet again, but will prioritize reading these local files. As long as these metadata files are complete, Emby can directly identify the key information of the video and automatically classify it into the corresponding movie entry.In other words, TMM is responsible for "scraping and generating nfo files", and Emby is responsible for "reading the results". The relationship between the two is more like "front-end editing + back-end presentation": the former prepares the data, and the latter is only responsible for displaying it. If files like posters and backgrounds have already been downloaded locally, Emby barely needs to connect to the internet during scanning to fully generate the interface content.Although the core scraping logic of TMM Free and Pro versions is consistent, the experience gap between the two is very obvious under large-scale media libraries (especially thousands to tens of thousands of videos), particularly reflected in

image quality, automation level, and reusability	these three points.	Feature
Free Version (Basic)	Pro Version	Number of Scraping Sources
Mainly supports TMDb / TVDb	Can add more data sources, customize priority	Image Quality
Standard resolution (approx. 1000px)	Original resolution (4K/Ultra HD level)	Automation Capability
Manual batch processing, requires manual selection	Supports automatic updates, scheduled tasks, incremental identification	Actor Images and Stills
Stability	Usually missing or low resolution	Complete actor avatars, logos, banners, etc.
Applicable Scenarios	Easy to trigger TMDb rate limiting	Multi-threading + API Key management, faster and more stable

Small personal collections (hundreds to thousands of titles)

• Medium to large media libraries (tens of thousands of titles, offline use cases)
• For Emby, this difference is directly reflected in:The .nfo generated by the free version is enough for Emby to identify video information, but it may still connect to the internet to pull high-definition images;。

3.4 Network Adaptation and Proxy Access Issues

The Pro version can download all images at once during the scraping stage,

achieving true offline display

In practical use, scraping not only tests the functionality of the software itself, but is also often limited by the network environment.

• Taking Emby's built-in TMDb plugin as an example, if your Emby is installed directly on a NAS, then the NAS needs to be able to access external network resources such as TMDb/IMDb to complete online scraping. This means that if the NAS does not have global proxy/VPN capabilities, simply modifying the hosts file is usually not enough to avoid network pollution or restricted access issues. When scanning a media library of tens of thousands of titles, you are very likely to encounter request failures, timeouts, or incomplete data.
• In contrast, TMM's offline scraping mode has a clear advantage in this scenario:
• All scraping work is executed on the computer side, requiring only this computer to have normal proxy/VPN access to the network;

In other words, this design of TMMshifts the network dependency from the server side to the client side, greatly reducing the complexity and potential risks of managing large-scale media libraries. For those with large collections who want their NAS to run stably in the long term, this is a very practical advantage.

3 TMM Installation and Basic Settings

1 TMM Installation

The installation of TMM is very simple, directly on the official website download page:https://www.tinymediamanager.org/download/just choose the deployment method suitable for your operating environment:

My work machine is an M4 Pro Mac mini, so I chose the aarch64 dmg file for installation.

2 TMM Basic Settings

As I already mentioned in section 2.3.3, TMM is divided into a free version and a PRO version. However, for use with Emby, the free version's features are actually sufficient, and you don't need to configure too many settings (the default configuration is fine).

After opening the TMM main interface, click the ”Settings” button at the bottom left to enter the settings interface:

You can see 4 major categories of option areas: General Options, Movies, Movie Sets, and TV Shows:

General Options

General Optionsis mainly responsible for defining the basic operating environment and global behavior of TMM. It determines the software's language interface, file naming rules, log and cache locations, proxy and network access methods, as well as compatibility settings with external players or media servers. Simply put, this part of the options does not directly affect the scraping results themselves, but it establishes the “underlying specifications” for TMM's operation—such as path formats, network access capabilities, and program stability. Proper configuration will make subsequent scraping, exporting, and synchronization processes smoother.

For example, in ”External Tools”, you can define external players used to play movies in TMM:

In ”System”, you can specify the memory size that TMM can use (I have too many movies, and the default 512 MB caused it to freeze completely—I later adjusted it to 4096 MB) as well as the external proxy server address:

Movies and Movie Sets

Moviesoptions are one of the two most core parts of TMM, specifically used to control the detailed behavior of movie scraping. This determines how TMM identifies movie files, which databases it retrieves metadata from (such as TMDb, IMDb, Fanart.tv, etc.), which types of images it downloads (posters, backgrounds, actor images, etc.), and the format and naming conventions for generating nfo files. Simply put, this category of settings directly affects the accuracy and completeness of scraping—with a reasonable configuration, TMM can generate clean, standardized local metadata that is fully compatible with media servers like Emby in a single scan.

For the free version of TMM, there isn't actually much to configure in this part of the options; just use the default values. The only thing that needs to be set is the ”Media Library Directory”:

and NFO settings:

For metadata scraping sources, the free version can only use TMDb, but then again, TMDb is enough:

As for the third category,Movie Setsthis option is mainly used to manage and beautify “Movie Sets”, which are grouped movies like “The Lord of the Rings Trilogy” or "The Avengers Series". It does not scrape movie information individually; instead, relying on the settings of the "Movies" module, it automatically matches the series artwork (such as collection covers and background images) from the same source and performs the necessary post-processing. Simply put, this category of options leans more toward visual and structural optimization rather than data-level scraping. Since there isn't much content, I won't go into detail; you can understand it just by looking at the screenshots:

TV Shows

TV Showsoptions are used to control TMM's scraping logic when handling TV series resources (including US dramas, Japanese dramas, anime, etc.). Similar to the “Movies” module, it is responsible for retrieving TV show metadata from specified databases (such as TheTVDB, TMDb TV, etc.) and generating corresponding nfo files, season posters, episode thumbnails, etc. The difference is that the directory structure of TV shows is more complex (Show Name → Season → Episode), so this category of settings also involves TV show naming rules, season number identification methods, and multi-language metadata matching strategies. Once properly configured, TMM can automatically organize the TV show hierarchy and generate a complete local library structure compatible with media servers.

Similar to the settings of the ”Movies” module, the free version of TMM basically only requires setting the ”Media Library Directory” and ”NFO Settings”:

For metadata scraping sources, the free version also only supports TMDb:

Of course, that is also enough.

4 Introduction to the TMM Main Interface

1 “Movies” Module

1.1 Overview

On TMM's main interface, “Movies” is the most core and frequently used functional area. The interaction of the vast majority of users with it accounts for almost 80% of the entire software usage time.

This is responsible for managing the metadata of all individual movies; everything from identification, scraping, and naming to cover downloads and NFO file generation is completed in this section.

In other words, if TMM is compared to a library management system, then “Movies” is the largest and busiest reading room. Here, you can see the complete movie list, search for information, update scraping results, and even perform batch operations on files.

In this interface, there are 4 functional drop-down menus: Update Sources, Search & Scrape, Edit, and Rename & Organize:

1.2 Update Media Library

“The ”Update Sources" drop-down menu is mainly used to manage and refresh the movie library in TMM. Through this, you can add new media library directories, update the entire library or the content of a specified library, or individually update the metadata of a specific movie. In addition, it can help you find missing movies across all media libraries or manually create new offline movie entries.

It is worth noting that when you execute “Update all media directories”, TMM will not only scan for file changes, but alsoautomatically identify and scrape metadata for newly added movies(if the automatic scraping option is enabled). In other words, this step is actually abatch, automatically triggered scraping process, which is very suitable for full-library synchronization after adding a large number of movies.

Overall, this functional area is the control center for keeping the movie library consistent with actual files and ensuring metadata is up to date. For daily maintenance and regular synchronization of new movies, it is an almost indispensable step:

For example, after adding new movies, you only need to click ”Update all media directories” at the very top to scan the newly added resources and automatically scrape them.

1.3 Search & Scrape

“Search & Scrape” is one of the core functions of TMM, used tomanually perform precise scraping for a single movie or a small number of movies. Through this menu, you can re-search the web and download metadata for the selected movies, including title, year, director, actors, plot summary, posters, and background images.

This feature is especially suitable for correcting identification errors during automatic scraping, choosing different scraping sources, or supplementing movies that were newly added but not automatically identified.

Combined with the previously mentioned “Update Sources” (batch, automatically triggered scraping), it ensures that your movie library is bothhighly efficient and automatic, while still allowing formanual fine control when necessary, maintaining data integrity and visual presentation effects:

Note: In daily use, when you add new movies to the media directory, you usually only need to scan the corresponding directory via “Update Sources” (lazy users can directly update all directories), and TMM will automatically identify and scrape the metadata of the newly added movies, including posters, fanart, and detailed information.“Search & Scrape” is mainly used to correct automatic scraping errors or to perform precise matching for specific movies, so if the newly added movies are scraped normally, there is generally no need to manually access this feature.

1.4 Edit

“The ”Edit" feature allows users to manually modify the metadata of a single movie or multiple movies. This includes information such as title, year, director, actors, tags, ratings, as well as adjustments to posters and fanart.

The purpose of this feature is to make up for omissions or errors that may occur during automatic scraping, allowing you to precisely control movie information based on actual conditions, thereby maintaining the integrity and standardization of the entire movie library:

Note: The “Edit” feature is similar to “Search & Scrape”, mainly used for manual fine-tuning or correction of automatic scraping results, and is usually not needed during daily additions of movies and batch scanning.

1.5 Rename & Organize

“The ”Rename & Organize“ feature is mainly used to unify the names of movie files and folders according to user-defined naming conventions and directory rules, and to categorize movies into designated directories. The convention here can be TMM's built-in naming templates or custom formats, such as ”Title (Year)“ as the folder name, and the movie file name unified as ”Title (Year) - Resolution.ext".

In this way, the file system remains neat, naming is consistent, and corresponds with the metadata of media servers (such as Emby, Jellyfin), thereby allowingthe storage and management of massive movie collections to be more organized, making them easy to find, sync, and back up:

Note: This feature directly modifies file and folder names, so if you must perform this operation, it is recommended to make a backup in advance. Personally, I prefer to organize the naming at the time of downloading to avoid the risks associated with subsequent batch operations, using it only as a last resort or for special circumstances.

2 Movie Sets

“The ”Movie Sets" section is specifically designed to manage movie series that have multiple sequels or related works. Unlike individual movies, here you can centrally manage various works of the same series, keeping metadata, posters, overviews, and other information unified.

The four main operations in this section are very intuitive: first, you can “Create Movie Set” to create a new set entry; the remaining three features (Update Set, Edit Set, Delete Set) are all single-button operations, requiring no complex drop-down menus.

Overall, this module mainly addresses the organization and management of serialized content, allowing multiple related movies to be neatly categorized in TMM and displayed consistently in media servers:

3 TV Shows

“The ”TV Shows“ section is similar to ”Movies" and is also divided into 4 drop-down menus:Update Sources, Search & Scrape, Edit, Rename & OrganizeThe only difference is that the objects managed here are TV series, individual episodes, and anime series, etc.

Through this module, you can add or update media library directories, scrape individual episodes or entire seasons, manually edit metadata, and unify the renaming and organization of file structures.

The functional logic and operation of this module are consistent with the movie module, making TV show management equally efficient and neat, and keeping it synchronized with the media server's data. Since this was already covered in the movie module, I won't waste words repeating it here:

4 Summary

This chapter mainly introduces the three functional areas of the TMM main interface and their respective core functions: Movies, Movie Sets, and TV Shows. Overall,the main interface of TMM is the operation center of the entire media library, covering functions such as Update Sources, Search & Scrape, Edit, and Rename & Organize, allowing users to complete most management operations within a unified interface, keeping the library complete, accurate, and visual.

It is particularly important to note that if you decide to use TMM as your primary media resource management tool,all operations are best completed within TMM: for example, adding movies, deleting movies, and adjusting folder structures should all be executed through TMM, rather than directly modifying the file system externally. The reason is that TMM's database is based on its internal index and metadata records. If you delete or move movies directly in the file system,clicking “Update all data sources” usually cannot fully recognize these changesTo make TMM correctly synchronize external modifications, theoretically, you must delete the media directory and then re-add and scan it.

Therefore, if you are more accustomed to directly managing media resources in the file system (as I am, having always used Everything to help find and manage resources), TMM is not suitable as a tool for frequent daily file management: deleting a media directory, re-adding it, and re-scanning can take 1-2 hours each time, which is especially time-consuming for large-scale media libraries. For these users,TMM is better suited as a “professional auxiliary tool for media library initialization and centralized scraping,” rather than a daily manager for adding and deleting movies.For example, before setting up a new Emby server and adding media libraries, you can first use TMM to scan and scrape all media library directories to generate nfo files, and then add the media libraries in Emby; subsequent daily scanning and scraping can be handled directly by Emby.

As for daily adding, deleting, or moving of movies, it is best to do basic organizing at the time of downloading to reduce subsequent maintenance costs.

5 Deduplication and Statistics: Utilizing TMM to Clarify Movie Counts

1 The ”Mystery of the Vanishing Movies” Triggered by an Emby Upgrade”

For those who have a “habit of downloading and collecting media resources,”regularly classifying and organizing resourceshas almost become a ritual. In the beginning, this organization might just be for “looking neat” and “easy searching,” but when the collection size skyrockets to thousands or even tens of thousands, some minor issues that could originally be ignored will turn into big troubles that must be faced.

Taking movie resources as an example, the two most typical problems are:

• More and more duplicate resources

This problem is almost inevitable because the same movie may have multiple titles, different languages, or even remake versions from different eras. Before downloading, I usually search in Everything first to confirm if I already have the same movie, and check the resolution, release group, and audio track format of the existing version. But the problem is—searching by Chinese name is often inaccurate because the same movie may have several translated names; while searching by English name is better, it is not always safe either, as the English names used in IMDb, Douban, or release group naming for some movies are not unified, and may even be mixed with titles in other languages.

Over time, these subtle naming differences accumulate into a large number of duplicate files—especially under the premise that I tend to keep the “best version,” whether the old version should be deleted and which copy should be kept becomes a troublesome decision-making problem.

• Inaccurate statistics on quantity

In the past, I relied mainly on Emby's media library statistics to count the total number of movies. But since Emby upgraded to version 4.9, some underlying mechanisms have changed significantly. For example, a new option has been added to the media library settings: “Multi-version item detection”, and it is enabled by default:

The result is—my total number of movies dropped from the original 19,108 to around 18,700, suddenly losing over 400 movies. Emby considered these 400+ movies as “duplicate versions” and merged them into what it believed to be the same entry.

But is that really the case? Because this discrepancy could also stem from Emby's recognition mechanism, such as differences in nfo metadata, minor differences in filename rules, or anomalies in symbol or path recognition. In other words, these 400+ movies might not be actual duplicates, but were “misidentified” by Emby.

To verify this, I need TMM to perform cross-validation.

2 Digression: Why Do I Care About Duplicate Resources and Statistical Accuracy?

Average friends might not understand why I pay attention to these minor issues that ordinary internet users might not care about at all. Let's put it this way: my current total number of movies in Emby's statistics is 18,725 (9,948+6,395+978+694+710):

Reaching 19,000 is just a matter of these last 2 months, and this doesn't even include 447 single-episode documentaries:

243 documentary series:

332 concerts:

759 cartoons:

and 2,339 series (587+701+558+225+184+84):

To give you an idea, below is a comparison of the number of movies on mainstream streaming platforms (as of 2025):

Platform	Average Number of Movies Globally	Number of Series (Seasons/Episodes)	Remarks
Netflix	≈ 3,500 – 4,500 movies	Over 2,000 series	Quantities vary greatly by region (the US has the most, while some countries have as few as 2,000 movies)
Amazon Prime Video	≈ 8,000 – 12,000 movies	Thousands of series	One of the platforms with the most movies, but the quality is uneven
Disney+	≈ 2,000 movies	Hundreds of series	Focuses on in-house content (Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars)
HBO Max (Max)	≈ 3,000 movies	Hundreds of series	Focuses on classics and original series
Apple TV+	< 500 movies	< 200 series	Focuses on high-quality boutique content
Hulu	≈ 4,000 movies	About 1,500 series	Content partially overlaps with Disney+
Tencent / iQIYI / Youku (Domestic)	Hard to estimate, about 3,000 – 6,000 movies	Mainly a large number of TV dramas	Emphasizes “series”, not movie-oriented

In other words, from a movie perspective alone, the scale of my collection is about four times that of Netflix, and close to one and a half times the global library of Amazon Prime Video; as for the series part, if cartoon content is included, it also exceeds 3,000 series, completely surpassing Netflix and second only to top-tier platforms like Amazon Prime Video.

In other words, my entire media collectionhas truly reached the volume level of mainstream global streaming platformsMore importantly, almost all of these videos come from Blu-ray disc encodes, among which there are 2,753 4K movies (2065+631+57)：

In terms of quality, it has long exceeded the compression standards of typical streaming platforms. Strictly speaking, this can no longer be called a “home media library”, but rather a semi-professional Private Media Archive。

And when the scale of a collection reaches this level, any minor identification error, naming discrepancy, or statistical deviation will be magnified into a systemic issue on a global scale.

3 Using TMM to Count Duplicate Resources

Although TMM also has filters and comes with a “Show duplicates” option:

But in practice, it is not very useful because its logic for detecting duplicates is very simple: it basically only looks atmovie title and year, without considering file paths, video resolutions, sizes, or even TMDb IDs. This leads to many “different movies with the same name” and “remakes” being falsely detected as duplicates, while movies that are actually duplicates but saved under different names cannot be detected.

So in the end, I adopted a more direct method: using TMM's “Export movie list” function to export the entire media library into a CSV file, and then screening them in Excel or Numbers.

The specific method is very simple:

1. Select all files in the ”Movies” module in TMM, and then select ”Export movie list” from the ”Edit” drop-down menu:
   
   

2. Select CSV format and export it as a ”movielist.csv” file:
   

   

3. Open Excel, and import the ”movielist.csv” exported in the previous step from “Data” - ”From Text/CSV”:
   

   
   
   
   

4. After opening the exported spreadsheet, select theTitle column, and use ”Conditional Formatting” to highlight duplicate names in red:
   

   
   
   Finally, click ”OK”:
   
   

5. Then combine this with year, path, and file size for manual judgment to confirm which resources are truly duplicates:
   
   

Although this step is slightly clumsy, it is currently the most accurate and controllable way. Especially for a library like mine with tens of thousands of movies, the cost of errors in automatic detection is too high, making manual review safer.

The final result after removing duplicate movies showed that at least about 312 movies across all categories were duplicates, with a duplicate rate of about 312/19108 ≈ 1.61%. Actually, this ratio is not high—after all, in a media library like mine with nearly 20,000 movies, as long as there are slight differences in naming or a mix of different versions (such as Blu-ray discs, encodes, different audio track versions), duplicates can easily occur. The duplicate rate for average users is generally between 0.5% and 2%, which is completely within the normal range.

And the final statistics count in TMM was 18,738:

This is basically consistent with the 18,725 movies counted in Emby (statistics after turning off ”Multi-version item detection”), and the difference is estimated to come from differences in counting rules and visibility between the two: For example, TMM might count each actual file as an independent entry (including minor variations or residual files with different resolutions/extensions), while Emby filters out certain file types during scanning, ignores non-standard named metadata (such as .mkv.nfo which is not recognized by new rules), or fails to count some files due to permissions, mount delays, path aliases, hidden folders, etc.

The fact that the statistics after turning off Emby's ”Multi-version item detection” function basically match the TMM statistics also indirectly shows that the ”Multi-version item detection” function still has flaws (I also tested it, and after turning on ”Multi-version item detection”, Emby's total statistics decreased by more than 240 movies). The key point is: if you really want to deal with duplicate resources, turning on this option won't solve the duplicate problem; it's just ”out of sight, out of mind,” which is a bit like burying one's head in the sand.

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Exporting movie lists also supports many other methods, including several HTML options, such as:

For example, the effect after clicking the ”007: GoldenEye” link is as follows:

There are other cooler display methods, such as those supporting search functions. Unfortunately, the HTML files exported by these methods are very large. The smallest is the one shown above, with the HTML file being nearly 5 MB, while those cooler ones with more features can have HTML files over 50 MB in size, which are only suitable for opening and viewing locally (even opening locally is painfully slow and has crashed my browser before).

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6 Afterword: Statistics Are Just a Means, Management Is the Focus

Through this comparison between Emby and TinyMediaManager, I have a few thoughts I'd like to share with everyone:

1. Statistical counts do not equal actual content

It may seem like “hundreds of movies are missing,” but in fact, much of it is just due to different file recognition logic by the software, or inconsistent naming, extensions, and NFO file formats. If you truly want to grasp the full picture of your collection, relying on a single tool or the software's default statistics is far from enough.

2. Tools have different focuses

• Emby's strength lies indaily viewing and automatic scraping, which helps you organize most of your media library into a ready-to-play state, but its multi-version detection or duplicate judgment logic is not perfect.
• TinyMediaManager's strength lies inexporting and detailed statistics, especially suitable for large-scale media libraries, scenarios requiring precise counts, or manual review of duplicates.

Therefore, using both in combination is often safer than relying on just one.

3. The duplicate rate is actually not that scary

With my statistics of nearly 20,000 movies, the duplicate rate is about 1.61%, which is considered very low for any large-scale collection library. Most duplicates stem from different Chinese names, different resolutions, different audio tracks, or minor editing differences. For the vast majority of users, keeping the duplicate rate between 1% and 2% is clean enough.

4. Methodology is more important than tools

My experience this time tells me:Export the list first, then compare using ID + file path, and finally perform a manual review, which is much more reliable than relying on automatic software detection. Statistics are just a means;maintaining standardized naming, unified NFO formats, and a clear folder structureis the key to long-term management of a large library.

In short, this statistics process not only gave me a clearer understanding of my collection but also helped me understand the limitations and advantages of various tools. For a collection enthusiast like me who owns over ten thousand high-quality movies,clear statistical logic + precise management methodsare far more important than simply relying on automatic scraping.