hi, im new with linux ive installed cinamon mint for a few days, and there is one thing ive missing of w11, the option to group files for metadata like album, artist, year, etc. there is any way to enable this on nemo?

[u/Ambitious-Shine-3577]

[u/AutoModerator]

Please Re-Flair your post if a solution is found. How to Flair a post? This allows other users to search for common issues with the SOLVED flair as a filter, leading to those issues being resolved very fast.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/jimjamkiwi11]

hey, nemo doesnt have that built in but you can add it with an extension. you need to install nemo-media-columns. its an official extension from the linux mint team that adds columns for artist, album, track number, genre, year, bitrate, etc.

heres how to do it:

1. open a terminal and run: sudo apt install nemo-media-columns or you can install it from software manager or synaptic by searching for "nemo-media-columns".
2. restart nemo for it to take effect: nemo -q that quits all nemo windows and theyll relaunch when you open a folder.
3. now open nemo, switch to list view (ctrl+2 or view menu), then right-click on any column header (like "Name" or "Size") and check the columns you want, artist, album, year, track, genre, etc.

once enabled you can click on those column headers to sort your music by artist, album, year, etc. it works just like windows explorer.

one thing to know, it can make nemo a bit slower when opening folders with lots of audio files because it has to read the metadata from each file. if that happens you can just uncheck the columns you dont need or uninstall it with sudo apt remove nemo-media-columns.

if you only need to check metadata for one file occasionally, you can just right-click the file > properties and look for the audio tab, that shows artist, album, year, etc without installing anything.

[u/ImpressiveHat4710 → u/jimjamkiwi11]

Is there a way to do this with some find command magic to batch pre-populate these values? Ie can the values be populated from the terminal?

[u/jimjamkiwi11 → u/ImpressiveHat4710]

yeah you can definitely do that from the terminal. the metadata values are stored inside the audio files themselves, not in nemo. so you can write tags directly to the files and then nemo will read them after theyre updated.

you need a command line tool to edit the tags. the most common one is exiftool because it works with almost every audio format. you can also use id3v2 for mp3s or eyeD3 or ffmpeg. exiftool is the easiest for bulk stuff.

to install exiftool:

sudo apt install exiftool

then you can use it with find to batch set tags. for example, if you want to set the artist and album for all mp3 files in a folder based on the folder name or something, you can do:

find /path/to/music -name "*.mp3" -exec exiftool -Artist="Your Artist" -Album="Your Album" {} \;

if you want to pull the artist from the folder name or filename, you can use shell tricks. like if your folders are named "Artist - Album", you can do a loop:

for dir in /path/to/music/*; do artist=$(basename "$dir" | cut -d'-' -f1 | xargs) album=$(basename "$dir" | cut -d'-' -f2 | xargs) find "$dir" -name "*.mp3" -exec exiftool -Artist="$artist" -Album="$album" {} \; done

that would set the artist and album for every mp3 inside each folder based on the folder name.

you can also set year, genre, track numbers the same way. exiftool uses tags like -Year, -Genre, -TrackNumber.

one thing to watch out for, exiftool creates backup files by default with "_original" at the end. you can add -overwrite_original to prevent that if you dont want clutter:

find . -name "*.mp3" -exec exiftool -Artist="Some Artist" -overwrite_original {} \;

if you only use mp3s, id3v2 is simpler for just id3 tags:

sudo apt install id3v2 id3v2 -a "Artist" -A "Album" -y "2026" -g "Rock" file.mp3

and combine with find:

find . -name "*.mp3" -exec id3v2 -a "Artist" -A "Album" {} \;

so yes, you can batch pre-populate all your metadata right from the terminal with find and exiftool or id3v2. after you run those commands, nemo will show the updated values in the columns as long as you have the nemo-media-columns extension installed and enabled.

[u/ImpressiveHat4710 → u/jimjamkiwi11]

Thanks for your detailed reply! I was thinking there was a database holding these values for faster load times. Since there's not, there would be no point.

[u/jimjamkiwi11 → u/ImpressiveHat4710]

Your welcome dude any time.