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[dnavratil]

Newbie David here, Been using Trial MC24 for 3 weeks now.  I had it set up where I had all my movie files and artwork (Which I downloaded myself) in 1 single folder with the name and year of the movie (Example = Love Me Tender (1956).  I opened up MC24 an hr ago and now each movie and poster is in it's own folder!! I no longer get any info on any of the movies, the structure of each file is Title - Year.  What has happened, I put a lot of work into this and now it all missed up!!! Thanks in advance for any help!

[RoderickGI]

Something else on your PC moved the files by the sound of it.

If the files have actually been moved, and you aren't just looking at a different View in MC. In fact, what View are you using in MC to see that the movies are in a different folder? If MC didn't move the files, you wouldn't see them in a normal view, but only in the Drive & Devices > Explorer View, as they would no longer be imported into the MC Library, depending on settings. Also, for movies MC would have created Sidecar files to store extra metadata. Where are those files now, back in the original directory, or in each new directory?

Certainly, the MC Rename, Move, and Copy Files (F6) could do that, but if it did, MC would still have all the movie information.

Do you still have iTunes installed, and did you open it or let it update?

Have you been using Windows Media Player, and letting it organise files?

Do you have any other media software that you have used in the past, or installed a trial for, and haven't uninstalled?


Unfortunately, if the files have actually been moved to another folder of their own, you can't just restore a MC Library Backup to fix it. But then having each movie in its own folder is Best Practice, IMHO, and is how I store my movies.

What you can try is to change the Auto Import settings to "Update for external changes" and uncheck "Ignore files previously removed from library", just temporarily, then manually run Auto Import. MC may then find the movies in their new location and associate the metadata it had previously with them, including the Cover Art.

[~OHM~]

just a add on....sidecar files are normally a hidden file so if OP didn't choose in windows to see them then they would not ...

[blgentry]

I've noticed that a lot of MC customers use the word "folder" when they see groupings in MC Views.  It's confusing because most of use think "directory on disk" when we see that description.  I suspect that this is just a view issue as Roderick has asked about.

Brian.

[swiv3d]

Take a look at the video files in windows explorer - are they in separate folders there? I suspect as RoderickGI has suggested that some other software is active on your machine, MC wouldn't do this,  especially if it wasn't active at the time!

[dnavratil]

I may have explained my problem badly!  Before I downloaded MC24 all my movies and artwork were in 1 directory!
This was all on 1 external hard drive!  I set up each movie and poster with the format Title (Year)  example is Godzilla (1954)(See Attachment named before)!  All the movies and artwork in just one directory.  I installed MC24 and had it import the movies from that 1 directory.  I had the program use my artwork instead of downloading from the internet.  Everything was working perfect for about 2 weeks.  I set up my view in the program as "Thumbnails, Grouped by Year" Looked perfect!  When I wanted to import more movies I just added the movies into that 1 folder on my hard drive and rescanned that folder to get the new additions into MC24. This morning I opened the program and the images were no longer there and most of the movie info was gone!   I went to the actual movie folder on my Hard Drive using Windows Explorer and saw that each of my movies was still in that folder BUT each movie and it own artwork was in it's own sub-directory(See Attachment named After).  The title of the subdirectory using the example above was Godzilla (1954) however the actual movie filed was renamed to Godzilla - 1954 (Using a hyphen instead of parentheses) and the name of each artwork was changed on each movie poster to just poster,  Example Godzilla - (1954) was now just named "poster" (See Attachment After 2)!    Check out the attachments I've included, maybe that will help! Tks, David

[swiv3d]

One might ask how you got a screenview snippet with a folder structure of H:\Before\    ?

[RoderickGI]

Your second image has the answer.

MC will never rename a poster image for a movie to "poster.jpg". It can be set to rename a poster image "Folder.jpg", but never "poster.jpg".

So something else moved your files and renamed the image file. I wonder what application names movie posters as "poster.jpg"?

[~OHM~]

probaly still has windows media looking at those files....

[dnavratil]

To everyone who responded to my initial question - I want to say I'm very sorry but I found what happened and it is my fault!!!  Last week I downloaded a program from "Freefiles.com". The software was called Erik's Movie Database.
I wanted to see if it would be any good.  I have since removed the program and everything is back to normal after I renamed all my files and put them all in 1 directory!!!  I know some of you spent a good amount of time responding to my question and again I will be more careful!! David N.

[RoderickGI]

Excellent that you found it and fixed the problem.