Please make it so that items added to a Smart Collection also apply to hiding in the content library. I have a Smart Collection named 3D Movies that pulls in movies containing ‘3D’ in the Edition field. I’d like for those movies to not display in the full Library list since they are now in the 3D Movies collection. I have ‘Hide items which are in collections’ set in my Library options and it works for manually created collections, but doesn’t work for the smart collection.
Yes apparently this is by design, but I just came here to suggest this.
I can’t talk for everyone, but I doubt we are the only ones that are hoping to tidy up not make more clutter with collections, so give us the option to decide what we want displayed, please!
Hide items in this collection does not work in smart collections this issue has been brought up countless times in the forum, once the staff replied in the future will be improved, will make the smart collections like regular collections can hide the items in the collection, however, 2 years have passed, and now it is still not possible to hide the items in the smart collections, please let the smart collections have the function it should have!
Set the library default to “hide items in collections”.
That way, the items in smart colelctions will be hidden.
If you have any (dumb) collections whose members you want to be exposed, override the library default in the properties of that collection.
The downside of this default is that it applies to all smart collections.
I have set the library to Hide items which are in collections, but the items within the smart collection are not hidden, regardless of whether the Collection Mode of the smart collection is Library default or Hide items in this collection.
It doesn’t look like this setting is working. My PMS is 1.32.4.7195, my Plex for Mac is 1.73.1.3905. And I only have one collection which is the smart collection for this library.
Same issue here - trying to use Smart Collections, but need the items to be hidden. Any update from Plex on this at all? It makes Smart Collections useless to me until this is fixed.
This option isn’t really feasible for smart collections due to their dynamic nature. It would require that every time you opened the library view it would need to query every smart collection to see what items are in them, this would be prohibitively expensive.
My approach is as follows: Due to the dynamic nature of smart collections, hiding individual items within them seems impractical. One possible solution is to generate a static list for each smart collection at regular intervals. This is equivalent to creating a dumb collection with the same items for each smart collection, and then hiding the items in this dumb collection. By doing this, the items in the smart collection are effectively hidden. Moreover, all these operations can be performed in the background without being displayed in the user interface. This way, the use of dumb collections as copies achieves the goal of hiding smart collections. I initially performed these steps manually, but I found that there is no built-in functionality to hide collections and items within them (which is much needed). Otherwise, we could directly achieve a similar effect, albeit with the presence of a dumb collection.
Why is this “prohibitively expensive”? My smart collections are displayed when I open the library view. Why would you have to “query every smart collection” when all you need to query is the collections being displayed in that specific library? When you edit the smart collection, you are given the option under Advanced to hide items, but PLEX is ignoring that. This is a BUG
The specific option to “hide items which are in collections” needs to know if an item is in a collection, this is fine for “dumb” collections as that is a static list which is a trivial query to the database.
Smart collections are dynamic and their items are built when you access them which means PMS would need to query every smart collection to find which items exist in them - this would be fine if you had a few small collections but would become progressively more expensive the larger your library and list of smart collections becomes.
While I understand the thought process - wouldn’t this be better if it were still a server-owner decision with appropriate warnings?
The performance impact for mega-libraries may be awful but presumably not nearly so bad for the majority of users with either more moderate library sizes or with a minimal number of smart collections.
Same issue here
You really need to figure out how to do this. Smart collections would allow me to reduce the number of libraries I have making it easier to navigate, especially for my family. I have a TV library for new stuff, an Archived TV library for stuff we have watched and want to keep, TV for Kids library, etc. Smart Collections based on a label or preferably a root folder ( I have these on different drives with appropriate root folder name) would allow me to include all of these in one library. However, if I can’t hide them in the library screen, then this would be a waste of time. Give me the option to hide and let ME decide whether it is “prohibitively expensive”
So this seems like it’s still an issue as I’ve run into this when trying to create better experiences for browsing with libraries and collections.
I know in the past we’ve been told that this is “prohibitively expensive” which I fully get, but I agree it should be an admin decision since we are our own hardware managers.
Any chance we get any movement or any other review of this as an option.. perhaps a different feature that gives us the same functionality for collections that is less expensive on the performance.. IDK, just wondering if the Plex team can think of a new solve if the requested one is a non-starter.
Late 2025 and this feature still isn’t available.
The argument that it is expensive confuses me a little, from my understanding, the rule would run after the smart playlists are generated.
The rule is smart in itself, if I create 5 new static collections today, the “show/hide if in collection” rule still updates.
