Display shared playlist more prominently

Feature Suggestions
1

I’m the Plex server owner in a non-techie household and the current system is unusable. I’m solely creating all playlists and want to share them with my managed users, so I have to either manually log-in to every user and painstakingly recreate them (WebTools helps a bit but doesn’t work with smart playlists) or share them, which makes them appear in the Shared library, which is cumbersome to use (it’s full of redundant stuff) and just simply doesn’t work on many Plex clients (including my FireTV).

Two ideas:

  1. Make shared playlists appear in the user’s Playlists library. Otherwise it’s empty anyway, so what’s the point.
  2. Create a new library and call it Shared Playlists, so my users can unpin their empty Playlists and pin this instead.

P.S. Managed users can’t even upload playlist posters, which just goes to show that Plex really has neglected this feature.

2

A playlist is currently not automatically shown to manages users because a playlist is editable. If a user saw it, they could change it or delete it, which could confuse the admin or the other user that create it. By having it in the Shared library, it’s obvious that they don’t own it so they can’t edit/delete it, only view.

Naming the section Shared Playlist doesn’t work since all shared items will appear there, not just playlists.

Managed user can edit the poster of playlists they create themselves. This is a new feature so make sure they are using the latest hosted version of Plex Web, 4.62.1. If they are using your local embedded version that comes with PMS, that won’t have the feature.

3

Yeah, obviously it would be shared read-only and indicated by a :locked: or something. That was kinda implied.

Try it and tell me how that goes.

4

Hi MovieFan.Plex,

Hope you’re doing well. Can I just say, it’s really frustrating having been a Plex user for over 6 years (first became a paid customer in 2015). I’m not blaming you, but it’s really REALLY obvious a lot of basic core features are not maintained, tested, or even cared about. I have a list of features/bugs that I log onto the Plex forums to check maybe once a year if there’s been any movement in the threads/bug reports/feature requests. Usually I see nothing has been done and I sign off to check again in a year. Every once in a while I actually get one that gets fixed after 3-4 years. For a while album labels simply didn’t work, but that was fixed. Yay!

Managed users is one of those items that seems to be ignored.

Nope.

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Works fine for the admin user, but since I’m in IT I don’t actually use my admin user as that’s typically not best practice. In Plex world I was using labels on music albums to filter the library and assigned labels to each managed user. For example my managed user doesn’t see my wife’s music that I don’t listen to.

So here’s why it’s so frustrating being a Plex customer. The avenue we have to ask for feature requests or report bugs is this forum. We have endless threads of issues that get ignored for years. They auto-close if nobody replies in what 90 days? So people make duplicates for the same issues. Then with no communication the feature gets implemented and there’s a post “Great news guys we implemented this feature!”. Except apparently it wasn’t tested fully, so it doesn’t work for some use cases or situations. There was no communication or iteration over the issue to actually make sure it was done right. Instead of Plex employees just making the feature how they want to make it, they should maybe check in with the users that are asking for it. I know that for some reason the Plex management doesn’t like sharing roadmaps. No idea why. Transparent communication with stakeholders is a good thing. If you build engagement and good relations people are actually willing to give you a break when things go badly.

Maybe the lack of transparency is because Plex keeps implementing features nobody is asking for, but refusing to even acknowledge features that would make it easier to manage our media (which is what I thought Plex was for…?). I can’t import an M3U playlist into Plex. Hell, I can’t even manage my Plex playlists in Plex very well. Anyone at Plex ever try to add a song to a relatively large playlist and then move the song near the top? Lol. It would take me longer to drag the song to the top of my playlist than for me to add a function to allow you to move a song to a # spot in the playlist. “Move to spot 3” would make it 3rd in the playlist. No mixed media playlists? Plex implemented linking music videos to songs in your library. Unfortunately the feature is useless because nobody thought of what the use case is since you have to click on the album in your library to even see the music video. How cool would it be to play your music albums on a TV (like with Chromecast or whatever) and when a song comes on that you have the music video for it automatically plays the music video on your TV instead of showing the album cover art.

Hey great news guys, we can share individual items from our libraries like playlists to other users! It’s been implemented. Doesn’t work for managed users sharing playlists they created to other managed users on the same server.

Hey great news guys, we can change poster artwork on our playlists! It’s been implemented. Doesn’t work for managed users.

Honestly I’m about to dump managed users. I was reading about the Camera Upload feature yesterday and how that was dumped because not that many people used it. The article even mentioned how it’s been broken so long. Well yeah, between Camera Upload being broken for so long and the Photos library not really being very good I can see why not a lot of people would use it. I bet managed users will go down that path.

TLDR:
Playlists shared to managed users unusable due to UI
Shared playlists unusable by managed users because they can’t even do it
Playlist artwork unusable for managed users
Playlist management is non-existent

If you made it this far and read the whole thing I just want you to know I love you.

3 Likes
5

What do you mean unusable?

I can reproduce the issue. I will let the team know.

I agree this needs work.

6

Hi again, thank you for replying!

Please see Ari’s messages. Shared playlists appearing in the shared library is cumbersome at best (for a non-techie it is confusing having playlists appear in multiple places), and depending on the Plex client the Shared library does not even appear, making it not usable at all. I can see the Shared library on the Web App, cannot see it on the Windows app, and can see it on iOS. I have an Nvidia Shield TV but haven’t tested it. Ari mentioned FireTV not including it.

Shared playlists only appearing in the shared library is inconsistent with the way the rest of the media is presented.

My admin user has shared all media content to my managed user. If I open the Shared library on my managed user, I can see all movies, TV shows, and music. Those things also appear outside of the Shared library in my standard movie, TV, and music libraries.

So in my Shared library I have both media I can’t edit (can’t change metadata, etc., only the admin user can) and I also have shared playlists that I can’t edit.

Outside of my Shared library, I have all of my other libraries with media I can’t edit, but shared playlists I can’t edit aren’t there. It’s inconsistent. The media I can’t edit simply doesn’t provide an edit button.

Admin user:
image

Managed:
image

Why not just consolidate the playlists into the user’s playlist library, and if we don’t have the means to edit it, just don’t let us edit it? Like Ari said, just give it a lock item. Or a single line of text at the top that says (Shared). An entirely separate part of the UI just won’t be found by the kind of user that doesn’t explore technology.

Another idea: have two sections in the playlist library, Playlists and Shared Playlists that you can select like tabs at the top, just like how media libraries present “Recommended” and “Library”

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For this one I mean the feature literally does not exist if you are a managed user.

If you enter a playlist on an unmanaged/admin user this is the hamburger menu. You can share the playlist.
image

If you do the same on a managed user, you are unable to share a playlist you created because the option is not available, even if all users can access all of the media that would go in the playlist.

image

Since everyone in the household uses managed users this means my wife can’t make a playlist and share it with me, she’d have to tell me what to put in a playlist, I make it in the admin user, then share it with both of us. My kids can’t make a playlist and share it with each other.

7

Totally agree with Shared being more accessible.

It would be nice to be able to see easily what’s shared other users.

Currently, when you click on the 3 dots on a Playlist icon and select Share, you get this page.
A green checkmark appears next to the selected user, you can only select one user at a time (which is odd), and the checkmark disappears the next time you open the same page!

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1 Like
8

Just adding in my 2 cents. When I shared my Marvel MCU Playlist with family members, they all said “Hey but my Playlist doesn’t list that playlist, I cannot find it”.

I literally had to walk them all through pinning the shared entry. Which brought questions like “Why do I see the TV library here again as well?”.

It’s not intuitive for the average non techie user that they should go to the Shared entry to find a shared play list.

I mean… we are showing the shared libraries right there in the menu. If it doesn’t make sense to have them get to the libraries via Shared, why would it make sense to send the user there for the playlist?
.

1 Like
9

I guess collections are the new playlists now. I’ve always assumed that collections were for e.g. “Toy Story 1-4” and playlists were for “Best Movies from the '90s” but I guess it’s all collections now. My only gripe with that is that collections don’t work across libraries, but other that than, it does the job. Just create your (Smart) Collection, hide it from the library view, and pin them (Plex Pass required). It’s dumb but I guess it is what it is.

10

Coming back for my once a year checkin and no progress since my last post nearly 11 months ago. That’s par for the course.

Hope you’re doing well. Can I just say, it’s really frustrating having been a Plex user for over 6 years (first became a paid customer in 2015). I’m not blaming you, but it’s really REALLY obvious a lot of basic core features are not maintained, tested, or even cared about. I have a list of features/bugs that I log onto the Plex forums to check maybe once a year if there’s been any movement in the threads/bug reports/feature requests. Usually I see nothing has been done and I sign off to check again in a year. Every once in a while I actually get one that gets fixed after 3-4 years. For a while album labels simply didn’t work, but that was fixed. Yay!

1 Like
11

I can reproduce the issue. I will let the team know.

Can you provide an update on this?

12

Are you referring to the issue I was responding to? That was solved a while ago.

Or are you referring to this request? We don’t give updates for feature requests.

13

I’m referring to one of the issues that was brought up (managed users not being able to change posters for playlists) - This still appears to be broken on my build (4.84.1)

14

Thanks. I thought that was fixed but I see I can still reproduce. Let me find out.

2 Likes
15

Hopefully this will be fixed. Spent a few hours today figuring out why it wasn’t working but then I find out it’s a bug.

16

Yes hopefully it does get fixed. First it needs to be tracked as a bug. It’s been ~7 months since I last posted in this particular thread, and at that time it had been 11 months since a team member acknowledged the issue existed. It’s been 18 months since we heard “I can reproduce the issue” and we haven’t progressed past that.

Looks like this thread is at 3 months since the last reply, so I’m dropping this here to keep the thread open due to the terrible forum software configuration in use here locking everything after 90 days.

17

Stumbled onto this thread after attempting to set playlist posters for managed users manually and via plexapi. Very disappointing its been an issue for so long.

18

Bumpy

19

Still seeing this issue. Would love to be able to actually customize the posters/artwork of playslists for non-admin users. Especially since the functionality appears to be there but it just doesn’t work…

Seems like an auth issue judging from the 403 error in the browser console logs and lack of anything in the actual Plex logs.

20

I would also like to know if this has been acknowledged by plex devs.

Currently I have two accounts, an admin, and a shared music account i use with my friend. My admin account can add posters easily, but admins cannot see what their users are building playlists about.

My shared account is not allowed to have custom posters despite being on the host computer (windows), or a different computer.

Would love to know if anyone figures it out!

Found this on reddit that makes sense for the most part ----

“If you still want to change the poster on a playlist as a Plex Home user, then you should look up how to get the cookies in your browser session and use something like Postman to make the request to change the banner. The cookies need to be the Owner’s.”