Allow to pin Collections for a specific user

Feature Suggestions
1

Currently this is impossible:

With the new server and web client version (1.22.3 and 4.56.3) comes a very exciting feature - Collection pinning (even Smart Collections!). But if you’re just a Plex user - you can not use it. You can ask the admin (server owner). And he can only pin that collection for everyone on the server. It’s impossible for one user to have a Marvel collection pinned, while the other user sees a DC collection instead. You can forget about pinning your favorite director if he’s not famous enough for everyone else to want to see his collection hub on their Home or Library page.

I wished for the Smart Collections and Collection Pinning features for so long, and had a lot of ideas for using them, but there is no way to use it individually. And I don’t have many cases where I would want a collection to be pinned for every user.

Most of the things you can achieve with the great new Smart Collections result in a very personalized feed. Not everyone likes the same Director/Actor/Genre/Studio/Franchise/other criteria. Collections can be much more personal than default recommended sections, but for now, it looks like pinning them is just as restrictive as pinning the default hubs like “Top-Rated”. It’s either works for the admin, or for everyone else too.

Proposed solution:

Useful for regular users:
1. Allow admin to pin collection for a specific user via the existing sharing interface.

Useful for advanced users that care very much about what content they see:
2. Allow users to unpin collections they do not want to see.
3. Allow users to pin collections for themselves if they want to, without depending on the admin.

UPD. With the addition of Smart Collections, a prominent issue was noticed: while a lot of its filters are very personal (Show rating, Show Plays, Show Last Played, Unplayed Episodes, Episode Plays, Episode Last Played, Episode Uplayed, Episode In Progress etc) it depends only on the admin watched state and ratings. This way, you are unable to create collections for things like unwatched shows/movies - it has the ones server admin did not watch, and what he watched will disappear even if the current user viewing the collection didn’t watch the title himself.

The Collections are visible to every user, but not every user needs to see a collection based on what/how often the admin watched something.

Smart Collections are a great instrument and in my opinion, this behavior severely limits it and affects the possible personalization prospects. In this way, the new suggestion I’m offering is in line with a current one, so I’m merging them into a one, “more personal”, Collections Feature Suggestion.

[IMPLEMENTED] 4. The option to make any Collection filter either admin- or user-dependent would help with a lot of use-cases (users could see their own unwatched titles with top critics score, while also being able to see a collection of titles the admin himself rated with 5 stars).

My guess is that one may be hard to implement if the current collection architecture expects the collections to be the same for everyone, and this would require keeping a lot more copies of the collection data (one for every user) vs a single one stored now. A better solution could be:
5. Making Smart Playlists pinnable (as a row) individually, and an option for the admin to share and pin such a playlist to every user of the server. It would immensely increase the possible personalization for other users.

1 Like
2

Some aspects of your suggestion have been implemented with PMS 1.25.6 which will now apply filters of shared smart collections based on the active user.

3 Likes
3

I was pretty happy to see this, but ultimately, I couldn’t get it to work :confused:

It just continued to show Movies / Shows that I have haven’t seen, always a possibility of user error so I’ll wait and see if anybody else has any issues

4

Thanks ! :open_mouth:

5

Ok, so the “pin collections for specific user” part of this request has not (yet) been implemented.

My use case for this is user-requested content. Currently I put each user’s requested content in their own individual library pinned to only their home screen, so that content doesn’t get buried. I’d rather put all these libraries together and use labels and publish smart collections to the home screen, but until there is control over which users see which collections, that would be a nightmare.

Plex can already restrict content based on label. How hard would it be to emphasize or individually target content based on label?

2 Likes
6

Just for anyone that was interested in this feature, I was trying to do this myself and figured I would use labels in a roundabout way to achieve this. I was hoping to exclude users from seeing a collection that had a label of the other users, but there is a bug that does not apply excludes to pinned items.

If you’re interested in watching the topic it is here: Excluded Collections Should NOT Stay Pinned to Homescreen/Library Recommend - Plex Media Server - Plex Forum

To be clear, if this gets fixed, it can make this feature moot.

2 Likes
7

Has there been any progress on this in the intervening years? My use case is to create a collection based on user’s requests and pin that to their home screen. I do not want every user to be able to see everyone else’s collections on their home screen. Everyone having access to all media is fine.

I tried doing what @EldonMcGuinness did and ended up here after the same failure. I agree with @EldonMcGuinness that if exclusions were respected on the Home View, the feature request would be moot.

Ideally, per user permissions would be the best approach but merely respecting the exclusions tags would get us there today.

8

@timbueno1, I have not seen any traction at all with regards to this issue. Which really is a shame as I have children and wanted to have home screen populated automatically based on exclusions. However, it’s impossible, for example, to have a Halloween collection pinned on the home screen that properly respects exclusions. I don’t need Freddy et al. Making an appearance to my little one’s profiles.

The closest I’ve seen is it was briefly mentioned in the recent fireside.

9

I admit that I mostly wrote here so the thread wouldn’t get automatically closed.

I’ll cross my fingers but won’t hold my breath. At the very least it seems like the bug mentioned in your post should be addressed.

10

I am also trying to create collections containing users’ media requests and limit it’s visibility across all tabs (home, recommended, library, collection) but as already mentioned, label restrictions are not enforced on the home and recommended tabs and I recently learned, also on a movie’s page (if that movie exists in a collection).

I am now exploring different ways of accomplishing this goal. You mentioned that you “put each user’s requested content in their own individual library pinned to only their home screen, so that content doesn’t get buried.”

Can you please explain how you do this? Do you have your media files in separate folders based on the user who requested it and then you create a library for each individual user pointing to that individual user’s media folder? If this is not what you do please explain. When first setting up my media server I considered this approach but decided against it when considering the scenario where multiple users request the same media which will result in file duplication.