Libraries & scanning

A library is a collection of media that lives in one or more folders on disk — for example, "Movies" pointing at your movies folder, or "TV Shows" pointing at a folder of shows.

Creating a library

From Settings → Libraries, choose + Add library and fill in:

• Name — whatever you want to call it.
• Kind — Movie, TV, or Music. This affects how Loombre reads filenames and organizes what it finds.
• Restricted — turn this on if this library should require a PIN and explicit permission to view (see Users & permissions). Off by default.
• Paths — one or more folder locations. The Browse… button opens a picker that navigates the server's own folders, so you can find the right location without knowing the path by heart. You can still type a path manually (useful for locations the picker can't show, e.g. inside a container); if you're unsure what's right, ask whoever installed Loombre (see the Operator Guide if that's you).

(screenshot coming soon)

Every library needs an explicit permission grant to be visible to anyone, including other admins, with one exception that applies to general libraries only: the admin who creates a general library is automatically granted access to it. A restricted library is never auto-granted to anyone — including its creator: you must grant yourself access the same way you'd grant anyone else, so a newly created restricted library is invisible to everybody until you do. See Users & permissions for granting access.

Restricted libraries

A library created with the content class Restricted is invisible to every account — including yours — until that account meets three conditions: a birth date on its Profile, restricted content opted in with a PIN, and an explicit grant on the library (Permissions in the library's ⋯ menu; the Add library dialog offers Grant myself access when you create one). Nothing in the interface hints at restricted content before then, by design; the Libraries screen carries a short reminder of the three conditions. See Users & permissions for what a grant does and does not do.

What scanning does

Once a library has paths, Loombre scans it — walking through the folder, finding media files, and reading each one's name (and, for music, its embedded tags) to figure out what it is.

• It keeps watching. After the first scan, Loombre notices new, changed, or removed files in that folder automatically — you don't need to trigger a scan by hand every time you add something. To force an immediate check anyway, use the Scan now button on the admin Dashboard's Libraries panel, or the Scan / Full rescan actions in a library's ⋯ menu under Settings → Libraries.
• Metadata fills in on its own. Newly scanned movies, series, artists and albums are matched against your metadata providers as they arrive. If a provider key was missing when a library was scanned, saving the key (Dashboard → metadata provider keys) matches every still-unmatched item in the background — nothing to press, no restart. The same happens when the server starts with a provider newly enabled through its environment variable. Two actions in the library's ⋯ menu rerun this by hand: Match unmatched (only items with no provider match yet — the same list the Dashboard's unmatched panel shows) and Refresh metadata (every item, keeping each one's existing match, so a Fix Match choice is never replaced). Both run as one job you can follow under Jobs.
• A wrong match can be cleared. Open the title's Fix match and choose Clear current match… (it asks once more). The provider match, its artwork, cast and overview are removed, the title and year go back to what the file name says, and the automatic matching leaves that title alone until you apply a candidate from the same dialog.
• It recognizes renamed or moved files. If you rename or reorganize a file within your library, Loombre matches it to the same file it already knew about (by its content, not just its name), so your watch history and other details are preserved instead of treated as a brand-new item.
• Missing files aren't removed immediately. If a file becomes temporarily unreachable — a network drive dropping out, for example — Loombre waits before treating it as actually gone (about three days), rather than immediately discarding it and losing your watch history over what might be a temporary hiccup.
• Naming matters for movies and TV. Loombre expects a reasonably standard naming pattern to correctly identify titles and episodes (for example, a movie folder or file named with its title and year, and TV episodes numbered by season and episode). Music is identified primarily by the tags embedded in the audio files themselves, not the filename.

(screenshot coming soon)

If a scan doesn't find what you expect, the Jobs dashboard shows the scan's progress and any errors it ran into.

Supported file types

Loombre recognizes most common video and audio file types when scanning:

Kind	File endings recognized
Video	.mkv, .mp4, .avi, .mov, .m4v, .ts, .m2ts, .mts, .webm, .wmv, .mpg, .mpeg, .vob, .flv
Audio	.flac, .mp3, .m4a, .ogg, .oga, .opus, .wav, .alac, .aac, .aiff, .aif

A number of recognized media file types are not supported in this version:

File ending	Why it's left out
.ape	Genuinely rare, thin support for turning it into something playable
.wv	Genuinely rare, thin support for turning it into something playable
.wma	Genuinely rare, thin support for turning it into something playable
.asf, .ogv, .3gp, .3g2, .divx, .m2v, .rm, .rmvb, .wtv, .f4v, .dv	Recognized video types not yet supported — reported as skipped so nothing disappears without a trace
.mka, .m4b, .dsf, .dff, .mpc, .tta, .ra, .shn, .amr, .ac3, .dts, .spx	Recognized audio types not yet supported — reported as skipped so nothing disappears without a trace

Files with one of those endings are never dropped silently — the scan's outcome always records a "N skipped (unsupported format)" count and the exact list of files. You'll see that note on the Libraries panel of your admin dashboard when a scan finishes while the dashboard is open (including if you opened it mid-scan), and the server's own log records every skipped file for after-the-fact review, so you always know what was left out and why, and can decide whether to convert those files to a supported type yourself.

Files whose endings aren't recognized as media at all — notes, artwork, text files, and other junk that rides along in media folders — are treated as non-media and ignored without a report. The skip report covers recognized media types only.

Separately, a file with a recognized ending can still turn out not to be readable media once Loombre actually inspects it — a corrupted download, a placeholder file, or a file that was simply misnamed. Those are reported too: the same Libraries panel shows a "N failed inspection (unreadable media)" note listing the affected files, as they're discovered, for as long as the dashboard stays open.