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.
