First of all… thanks for the recent collection overhaul – very much appreciated
I’d like to request an addition to the current implementation to allow better control on how collections / movies are displayed inline in a library.
From what I noticed, there’s 2 different use cases for collections:
movie bundles / franchises (e.g. Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Star Wars) – that’s usually the ones you could get from The Movie Database
movie clusters with a common background (e.g. Best Picture Winners, but also Pixar Movies)
Things get tricky when you have both use cases in your library and you want to collapse / hide movies from franchises but not from the clusters. Therefore I believe it’ll be very helpful to allow an additional option in the advanced collections settings, overriding the library setting of how collections will be displayed.
##On library level there’s 3 options:
deactivate
Hide items which are in collections
Show collections and their items
##On a collection level, 2 options should do:
Hide items which are in this collection
Show this collection and its items
optionally: Hide this collection from inline view (for those who want extra collections solely for filtering purposes)
This approach could result in some contradictions if 1 movie is in different collections which have different visibility settings.
Example: “Toy Story” could be in a Toy Storyfranchise collection AND in a Pixar Moviesbundle or some Academy Awards Winnerbundle (not best picture… but they got some special award if I remember correctly). Pixar Movies and Academy Awards Winner collections are configured to display collection and their items, the Toy Story collection is configured to collapse / hide its items.
In that case it feels logical to me not to show the Toy Story movie inline in the library – so 1 “hide item” setting overrules the 2 “display item” settings (for this specific movie). This would allow us to see “Inside Out” as a standalone movie (only included in the Pixar Movies collection, so no potential conflict), while “Cars”, “Toy Story”, “Monster Inc.” and “Finding Nemo” have their own franchise collections and are therefore collapsed with their sequels.
I believe it’ll also make sense to apply the same model for the collection item sorting (default configuration per library, can be overridden per collection) – hence I’m using this opportunity to promote another feature request raised these days:
PS: There’s already a similar approach when it comes to TV shows and how to display seasons (default setting per library, can be overridden per show).
I’d love this as well. For me it really shows up with my MCU collection. It makes it so a movie like Doctor Stange is only available in that collection. Right now my work around is to make a second single movie collection called Doctor Strange. But that’s kind a junky work around.
@tom80H I agree with a lot of your issues here. My main point of difference is that I really never want to see the second type of “collections” that you refer to as clusters within my main list. I would love to be able to create those types of groupings, but only if I can access them somewhere else other than my main movie list.
Completely agree (and apologies, I posted a duplicate request, was unable to find this one!)
Lightroom does something similar, with “virtual collections”. I don’t really mind how it is implemented, but my use case is very similar to above; would love “Thor”, “Iron Man” and “Captain America” collections which show up in the main movie list, and then additionally a “Marvel” collection which does NOT show up in the main list, and which allows me to add Dr Strange to the others.
I also like to make collections like “Shane Black” or “Jack Ryan”, which can’t be easily grouped by anything else (Shane Black both writes and directs, and Jack Ryan are completely related movies over many years).
I generally love collections though, spent a happy hour going through my library yesterday and finding nice art for them!
That’s odd… this filter doesn’t show up for me on my iPad.
Maybe this is because I currently haven’t assigned any label tags for sharing. I’ll check this out when home
it appears Labels will only be considered for filtering when you have more than 1 movies assigned to the same label – interesting… I never noticed that before.
@tom80H said:
it appears Labels will only be considered for filtering when you have more than 1 movies assigned to the same label – interesting… I never noticed that before.
proving myself wrong… Labels appear only to be available when you have multiple users on your server and/or a PIN assigned to your own Plex Account (still odd).
Less complicated than above, I think there needs to be another option for "Show collections and their items iff more than 1 item"
I like having everything presented to me, but a “collection of 1” doesn’t give me any extra info (other than saying i don’t have every movie/show in a collection).
When the collection feature was added, more hundreds of collections were automatically populated for me, but most are of a single movie.
Additionally, for collections populated automatically, it would be nice to optionally display which collection items you’re missing (if any) when viewing its contents.
It appears for items in multiple collections, setting an exception for 1 collection will overrule the settings of the other collections.
Example:
I’ve got a “Marvel Cinematic Universe” collection with e.g. Iron Man 1-3, Thor 1-3, Ant Man, Spider Man Homecoming and some others. Iron Man 1-3 and Thor 1-3 are in addition bundled in their own collections.
My library standard is to hide items which are part of a collection.
By changing the MCU collection’s collapse setting to “show collection and its items”, all items will be displayed – even those with collections of their own which should overrule this.
Expected result: Iron Man and Thor collections show but their items remain hidden, Ant Man or Spider Man however show as individual items.
It appears for items in multiple collections, setting an exception for 1 collection will overrule the settings of the other collections.
Example:
I’ve got a “Marvel Cinematic Universe” collection with e.g. Iron Man 1-3, Thor 1-3, Ant Man, Spider Man Homecoming and some others. Iron Man 1-3 and Thor 1-3 are in addition bundled in their own collections.
My library standard is to hide items which are part of a collection.
By changing the MCU collection’s collapse setting to “show collection and its items”, all items will be displayed – even those with collections of their own which should overrule this.
Expected result: Iron Man and Thor collections show but their items remain hidden, Ant Man or Spider Man however show as individual items.
Maybe next time
I have this exact issue as well…
I want “single movies” in my marvel cinematic universe collection to be shown, but movies with sequels should be hidden inside their own respective collection.
So example, Iron-man 1-3 should be hidden in library and be included in mcu and iron-man collection. But Black Panther should be shown in library as well as be included in mcu collection.
Right now I’m using a workaround which is to hide all movies in collections and then create collections for “single movies” with only that movie inside, so I have a collection for Black Panther even though there’s only one object.
I think any manually edited collection mode should override if the item should be shown or not over a collection which uses library collection mode.
I agree with the comments of others and would like to see some improvement. I feel like there are a few different approaches which I would like to add to the discussion:
add possibilty to define a main collection for a movie and use its settings - main drawback is that this means that this use-case becomes a per-movie-setting instead of per-collection-setting
create categories for collections: movie bundles/movie clusters - handle visibility differently for those - main drawback is that we would reduce flexibility by hardwiring those in the product
add a new option to the visibility dropdown of a collection that it shows movies if they are not in another collection - in that case the setting of the other collection should be used. If the other collection uses the same setting, the library default should be used. I like that one as you only have to configure this for those special use-cases like “Marvel Cinematic Universe” etc.
I appreciate a lot of people love Collections, and maybe I just haven’t spent any time with them to appreciate them (I have always used the “Sort By” tag to group my collections, such as “MCU 01” through to “MCU 18” for the Marvel films), but I’m sure there must be others like me out there who, at least for now, simply want to turn off Collections.
That should be a simple tick box in the Settings, no?
Instead I have to periodically view my library by Collections and delete them all so I don’t have what looks like duplicate entries, etc.
