It’s not a full feature request but there seems to be some issue with current per collection viewing rule for current implementation.
For example,
The Return of the King is part of Lord of the Rings collection as well as Oscar Best Picture collection in my case. I’d rather hide individual items for Lord of the Rings collection. But I don’t want to do the same for movies on Oscar Best Picture collection for obvious reasons.
This creates two conflicting collection rules, resulting Return of the King (following Oscar rule) still showing where as Fellowship and Two Towers doesn’t (following LotR rule)
Can we have Plex put higher priority on “hide” option for these situations?
Early on in the implementation of collections, after the ability to have collections that overrode the library default was added, that behavior was reported as a bug but Plex said it was the planed behavior and it was not going to change.
I can see how two conflicting defaults could produce problems and I am also unsure if the behavior you suggest would not produce just as many problems for people.
I think there should be a fourth possibility and that is “Show collection and do not change the show/hide status from other collections.”
I also think that there should be a way to have truly nested collections. That is collections of collections where the show/hide status is respected.
But we must be thankful for what we have. It took long enough for true collections to get implemented and it will take even longer to get these reasonable refinements brought into the fore.
I see. I wasn’t aware that this was intended behavior. Seems rather counterintuitive in my opinion as there are rarely, if any, cases where current behavior is desired.
Yes, having current implementation as is achievement enough after years repeated of request. I was very excited when Plex implemented collection in similar manner to the mock up I created for the request years ago.
But this is rather disappointing as this prevents me from organizing the library the way I imagined. I guess I can live without having trilogies in a collection, but I was hoping to group movies that has shorts that go with it, i.e. a lot of Pixar and Disney films that has side story shorts, into one. I guess award collections will have to be on hold for me.
Hope future improvement (further customization options) happen down the road.
This is about how Plex handles e.g. movies which are part of multiple collections with conflicting display settings.
My default setting is to hide items of a collection. This definitely works great for franchise collections (such as Iron Man, The Matrix, Star Wars…) – not so much for other clusters such as Oscar Winners or studio based collections such as Pixar/Studio Ghibli movies. For those I do like to see the individual movies on top of the collection.
One of the updates earlier this year added the functionality to override display/visibility settings for individual collections (great addition – thank you!).
Here comes the catch…
Things go wrong when you start having movies that are part of multiple collections.
With my library configured to hide items of a collection, having a separate collection which is configured to deviate from that setting results in all items to be displayed no matter what (+ their collections).
Example:
Collections (hide items)
Iron Man (containing Iron Man 1-3)
Captain America (containing Captain America 1-3)
Thor (containing Thor 1-3)
Cluster Collection (show collection and its items)
Marvel Cinematic Universe (containing Iron Man 1-3, Captain America 1-3, Thor 1-3, Doctor Strange and Spider Man Homecoming)
I would like to see that the hide items setting overrides the show items/show collection and its items settings. So as long as a movie is in a group that tells it to hide, this should be the rule.
Item
Expected Result
Current Result
Comment
Iron Man, Captain America and Thor collections
visible
visible
Iron Man 1-3, Captain America 1-3 and Thor 1-3 movies
hidden
visible
all those movies have a collection of their own which overrides the display items of the Marvel Cinematic Universe collection.
Marvel Cinematic Universe collection
visible
visible
Doctor Strange and Spider Man: Homecoming movies
visible
visible
these 2 movies are not part of another collection.
Mod Edit: merged feature request on same topic to merge/free-up votes.
Agreed. The current default behavior seems to be the exact opposite of what you would want. I have a hard time understanding why it would have been developed that way intentionally unless the developers had a radically different intended use case for Collections than most of us.
Voted. I just recently started working on those collections where I don’t want to hide the individual items (like Stephen King, Oscar Winners), and noticed that now those movies that fall in another collection are showing in addition to the series collections. This is going to keep me up at night.
I just added the same suggestion before someone else pointed this one out.
In my case, it is very similar. I have created collections like “Christmas Collection”. In there, I have movies that I want to hide and only see if you open up that collection - like “Frosty the Snowman”. However, I also have movies like “Die Hard” in there, that I want to be seen in and out of the collection. So being able to toggle it on a movie by movie basis, with a setting on the movie for “Hide if in a Collection”, would be very useful.
I wouldn’t even mind if it defaulted to work like it currently works but I had to dig deep to change a setting to make it work like we want it to work.
I think the problem here is that people who are really into customizing their collections and put hard work into their collections are hindered because of people who probably don’t care.
User 1:
People who just don’t use collections, probably the majority… Changing this does nothing to hurt them.
User 2:
People who use Collections but don’t make custom collections… Again changing this won’t hurt them
User 3:
People who like to customize their collections and put work into it… Changing this would be fantastic for us
I’m thinking though that since we are the minority the chances of this changing are almost none.
What are some reasons we would want show items in a collection to take precedence over hide items in a collection? If an item is in multiple collections and one is set so hide items and the other set to show; show items takes precedence.
So if I have a 300 collection and that is set to hide items but one of the movies is also a part of my favorites collection that is set to show items. I wouldn’t want to hide all my favorites but if some of those are within collections that I do want the items hidden I still want them hidden. I went through and thought about all my collections and the way it works does seem backwards. I can’t think of a reason I would want it the way it works.
There are really at least 2 types of collections however. You could break it down to more than 2 but by what the intent is there are 2 that I can think of. One is direct sequels and I see no reason not to hide items contained within those collections. The kinds of collections can all be summed up into the second type. It is just a relational grouping. In this case I don’t want to force hide the items within but if they are hidden already from the first type they should remain so. This can be for collections byt director, studio, artist, “universe” like Marvel Studios or The Conjuring Universe, Oscars, or whatever you prefer.
I was thrilled to learn collections can be set on and individual basis but disheartened when I learned that when I hide the items within the Back to the Future collection but because the first part is also a part of my favorites collection and those are not hidden that the first part then does not get hidden. I wouldn’t want universe collection to force hide items either but items that are hidden from other collections like direct sequel collections I would want to remain hidden.
So I propose either if an item is part of a collection that is set to hide items that, that takes precedence and the item remains hidden. Or, a bit more involved approach that recognizes their are at least two types of collections and adds a second type. The first taking precedence over the second. Call them what you will.
I could use lists for favorites, universe, or other types of groupings like director or Oscars but lists are nowhere near as useful and handy or obvious as collections. But this would only be handy if lists also took on a role more similar to how collections work. Before collections took on the in library/inline powerful form they now have over just the drop down filter they weren’t that obvious and useful to those not in the know and at times lists were a more suitable option. But now collections are doing it nearly right and lists I only have one use for to put in order all the episodes of Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe in the order they aired so the episodes of overlapping series could be viewed in order and within context of each other, Other than that I really don’t have a use for lists. Mostly just for play order.
So back to my question what are some supporting reasons to keep collections the way they are over what I propose. As of now even though I can individually set each collection to hide or show items I have to choose just to show everything anyway because it is too messy to have things showing that should be hidden.
If items are in a collections with hide items in this collection and another withshow this collection and it's items. Then hide items in this collection should definitely take precedence over how the items are being displayed.
Should also probably rename it to show collection but hide it's items or something similar for clarity…
I’d suggest also having the option to choose between hide collection and it's items and hide collection but show items instead of only the latter which is currently our option.
Have run into the same issue, I have hide in collection for all my movie trilogies and sequels, but i also have a must-watch collection which i just highlight some of my favorite tv & movies.
This seems like an easy tweak, would love to see this in an update soon.
There is also another situation which has an undesired effect. I also have movies in multiple collections. Example being Marvel Movies and Iron Man collections. In my library I don’t really want to see Marvel Movies. If I want to see that collection I can just switch to the collection screen, so I chose to Hide Collection. That hid my Marvel Movie collection but placed all of the movies back into my library individually. I would like to see this have the same function described above.
Okay, I think I have a work around for those that don’t want to wait for a fix.
Create a new collection and give it any name you want. I chose to use ZZ as the sort name (so it goes to the bottom of the collections page) and Single Movies as the display name.
Add all the movies that you want to be displayed in your library as single movies (not any other collections) to the new Single Movies collection.
Now go to that new Single Movies collection and click edit. Change the display status to Hide Collection.
Now any movie added to the Single Movies collection will show up in your library without changing the state of your other collections. The new Single Movies collection will only show up on the collection page (and if you used zz as the sort name it will be at the bottom).
You can try the work around I mentioned above. It is working for me and sounds like it would work for you.
After you created the new collection (Single Movies) you would place the movies you want to see outside of any collection in that collection (i.e. Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, etc.). Do not add movies you want to stay in a collection to the Single Movie collection (i.e. Toy Story, Monsters Inc. etc.) Then when you hide the collection all of those films will be in your main library.
Good work around but bad for the long run and for anyone with a decent size library. You’d basically have to go in and check every few months or days etc as movies come on to remove them once they have a collection.
Actually it wouldn’t be THAT bad but there are no custom filters for “No Collection” is there? If they did have that then maybe this would be better. Let me know if there is a way to find single movies.
