📋Summary

Introduce support for alternative names (aliases) for both Platforms and Playlists to improve media scraping accuracy and prevent duplication. These alternative names would allow LaunchBox to better match games, videos, and images—even when community-created content uses different naming conventions.

❗Problem

Right now, platforms and playlists rely on exact name matching when scraping media or searching the LaunchBox Games Database. However, many systems and collections are known by multiple names depending on region, clone hardware, or community shorthand. For example:

• The Nintendo Entertainment System may be known as Phantom System, PolyStation, or Turbo Game in different regions.

• A Sonic Collection playlist might be titled Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Games, or Sonic and Friends.

This causes problems when scraping media or syncing with community packs, as LaunchBox may fail to retrieve content due to minor name mismatches. It also makes it difficult to merge or unify similarly-named playlists.

💡Proposal

• Allow each Platform and Playlist entry to have an optional list of aliases or alternative names

• Use these aliases when performing media scraping or database matching

• Enable users to add aliases manually when editing a Platform or Playlist

• Optionally show a tooltip or visual tag when an alias was used to complete a media match

• Enable merging or linking of playlists with matching aliases to reduce duplication and cleanup clutter

✅Benefits

• Improves scraping accuracy across both official and custom collections

• Reduces missed media matches due to name variation

• Makes playlist and platform management more flexible for international users or clone systems

• Helps unify fragmented collections under one logical entry 🔍📼🎮