Scraping English Titles

9 minute read

tinyMediaManager has always been focused on giving users maximum control and precision over their media libraries. Today, we’re excited to introduce a brand-new feature for the upcoming version v5.2 that brings even more flexibility for multilingual collections: scraping the English title of movies, movie sets, TV shows, and episodes.

This new addition adds a dedicated English title field and extends functionality across NFO files, renamers, and exporters. Let’s take a closer look at how this improves your media management workflow.


What Is the “English Title” Feature?

Traditionally, tinyMediaManager scraped and stored the title of a media item based on the preferred language set in your scraper configuration. But in international libraries, this often led to issues — especially if the original title was obscure or non-Latin, or if the media center you’re using prefers English for consistency.

To solve this, we’ve added a new “English title” field across all relevant entities:

  • Movies
  • Movie Sets
  • TV Shows
  • Episodes

This new field is populated using compatible scrapers that support multilingual metadata. It exists in parallel to the main title and original title fields — it does not replace them.


Where Does the Data Come From?

The following scrapers are currently supported for fetching English titles:

  • Movies: TMDb, IMDb, TVDb, AniDB
  • Movie Sets: TMDb
  • TV Shows: TMDb, IMDb, TVDb, AniDB
  • Episodes: TMDb, TVDb, AniDB

During scraping, tinyMediaManager now queries the English title from these sources regardless of your preferred language, and stores it into a new dedicated field.

This behavior is automatic — you don’t have to do anything special besides enabling the appropriate scraper and ensuring that the scraper supports English metadata.


NFO Integration

To ensure compatibility with external media centers (like Kodi, Plex, Emby or Jellyfin), we’ve extended the NFO schema to include a new tag:

<english_title>Title in English</english_title>

This tag is now automatically written into the NFO file for all supported entities. This small addition helps ensure that your media center can display consistent English titles, regardless of the primary title used.


Renamer & Exporter Support

With this update, the English title can now be used in:

  • Renamer templates – for naming folders or files using the English title
  • Export templates – for including English titles in HTML or other exported formats

Example: Renamer Template

You can now use the variable ${englishTitle} in your renamer setup:

${englishTitle} (${year})

If “千と千尋の神隠し (Spirited Away)” is in your collection, this would rename the folder to:

Spirited Away (2001)

This can be particularly useful when you’re sharing your collection or want to standardize file names across devices with different locale settings.


How to Enable or Use the Feature

To take advantage of the new “English title” feature:

  1. Update tinyMediaManager to the latest version (this feature is available from version 5.2.0 onward).
  2. Use a compatible scraper – TMDb, IMDb, TVDb, or AniDB as applicable.
  3. Adjust your renamer/exporter templates to include ${englishTitle} if desired.
  4. Rescrape your media – either individual titles or in batch – to populate the new field.

Why This Matters

Managing international or multilingual collections often comes with challenges:

  • Non-English titles might be hard to recognize at a glance
  • Media centers may display titles inconsistently
  • Sorting and renaming is harder when titles are in different alphabets

By providing the English title separately, tinyMediaManager lets you choose how and where to use it — without overriding localized or original titles.

You remain in control: use the English title when you want to, and ignore it when you don’t.


A Quick Recap

Here’s a summary of what the new “English title” feature brings:

  • New englishTitle field for all media types
  • Scraped from TMDb, IMDb, TVDb, and AniDB
  • Written into NFO files as <english_title>
  • Usable in renamer and exporter templates
  • Optional and non-destructive to your existing title data

Final Thoughts

This is a small but powerful addition to tinyMediaManager — one that makes organizing international collections more intuitive and compatible with global setups. Whether you’re cataloging anime, foreign films, or simply want better file naming, the English title feature gives you new flexibility without compromising data quality.

As always, we’re committed to making tinyMediaManager the best open-source media organizer for advanced users and hobbyists alike.

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Manuel Laggner

Manuel Laggner

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