How Scanning Works

Prismedia treats your folder layout as the source of truth. You decide which folders are watched roots and which media types each root scans; the scanner walks those folders and turns files into entities.

This page covers the mechanics shared by every media type. The per-type rules — with the exact extension lists and folder trees — are on the dedicated pages:

• Videos, Movies & Series
• Images & Galleries
• Books, Comics & eBooks
• Audio & Music

Watched roots and scan types

A watched root is a container path plus per-type scan toggles. A scan walks the root (recursively, unless Recursive is off) and dispatches each file to the scanner for an enabled media type.

Toggle	Looks for
Videos	Video files → movies, series, seasons, episodes.
Images	Image files → loose images and galleries.
Books	Comic archives (.cbz/.zip) and single-file books (.epub/.pdf).
Audio	Audio files → artists, albums, tracks.

Keep folders that need different behavior (different media types, or NSFW vs not) as separate roots.

What the scanner skips

Three things are never turned into entities:

1. Hidden folders. Any directory whose name starts with . (for example .thumbs, .AppleDouble, .git) is skipped entirely, along with everything inside it.

2. Generated artifacts. Files whose name (before the extension) ends in one of these suffixes — with a -, _, or . separator — are treated as derivative media and ignored:

   -preview  _preview  .preview
   -thumb    _thumb    .thumb
   -sprite   _sprite   .sprite
   -sample   _sample   .sample

   So movie-preview.mkv and cover.thumb.jpg are skipped; Heat (1995).mkv is not.

3. Excluded paths (see below).

Unsupported extensions are simply not picked up by any scanner.

Scan exclusions

Use Files → Exclude to keep a path out of future scans without deleting it from disk. Exclusions are reversible from the same context menu.

• Exclusions are literal paths, not glob patterns.
• Excluding a folder also excludes everything beneath it (/media/movies/skip hides /media/movies/skip/anything).
• Entities that fall under a newly excluded path are removed on the next scan; removing the exclusion and rescanning brings them back.

Incremental scans

Each scan records the files it saw under a root (by size and modified time). The next scan compares the folder against that record and, when nothing was added, removed, or changed, skips straight past the detailed work instead of re-examining every file. Scheduled rescans of large, unchanged libraries finish almost instantly; the first scan, and any scan where files actually changed, does the full pass.

note

Editing a metadata sidecar (for example an .nfo) without touching its media file is picked up on the next real change or an explicit entity refresh — not on an otherwise-unchanged rescan.

There is at most one scan per media kind in flight at a time. A scheduled scan, a newly added folder, and a manual "scan" all reuse the in-flight scan for that kind rather than stacking duplicates.

Sidecar and embedded metadata

The scanner imports metadata that sits alongside or inside your files, so newly scanned items arrive with real titles and details before any provider identify:

Media type	Source	Notes
Video / Movie	*.nfo, movie.nfo, *.info.json, *.json, movie.info.json, movie.json	Title, description, date, studio, URLs, tags, cast/crew, duration.
Comic	ComicInfo.xml inside the archive	Title, series, issue/volume, summary, date, publisher, creators, tags, age rating.
eBook	Inside the .epub/.pdf	Title, author, description; cover from the EPUB image or the PDF's first page.
Audio	Embedded tags (read at probe time)	Title, artist, album, track/disc numbers, cover art.

User edits made in the app are intentional library state. Routine rescans preserve your edits, ratings, visibility, relationships, and playback/reading progress.

When to rescan

Rescan when:

• Files were added, moved, renamed, or deleted outside Prismedia.
• You changed scan toggles on a root.
• You added sidecar metadata.
• You removed an exclusion.
• You want Prismedia to reconcile linked file state after manual cleanup.

Scans are idempotent and safe to run repeatedly. Run one from Jobs, Settings → Watched Libraries, or Files.