I would love to have the ability to exclude Collections from a user’s view, specifically the homescreen / library recommend pinning.
In my case, I wanted to have Collections pinned to the homescreen for each of my family memebers with their favorite videos on it. However, exclude movies does not seem to exclude movie collections if it is pinned to the homescreen or library recommend. To be clear, the collection does disappear from the collections section of the movies library, but it is still available on the homescreen and library recommend screen.
A similar post mentions that empty collections do not show on the homescreen / library recommend, however, I do not want to exclude individual items as I want everyone to have access to the movies, just want to limit who has access to certain collections. Again, this works in the Collections section, but it does not work with the Pinned to homescreen/library recommendation.
Not sure if this is supposed to be how it is to work, if the mods thinks this is more a bug than a request, feel free to move the post.
I have a number of family members that use my plex server. Each of them has their favorite movies that they want to have easy access to from the homescreen. In hopes of achieving this, I created a collection for each one of them. and gave it a label with their username user_1, user_2, user_3, and user_4. From there I went into the excludes for each user and excluded the labels of the other users. For example, user_1 would have the labels user_2, user_3, user_4 in their exclude list, under the Manage Library Access area. Now this allows me to add the label user_1 added to a collection named User 1’s Favorites.
Now, this works if they browse the collections section of the movies library, each user only sees their Favorites collection and they still retain access to all the movies in the library. However, if I then try to Pin this collection to the homescreen or the library recommended screens, all the users see each other’s collections on those screens. The expected behavior would be each user would only see the collection that they have permission to see, but that is not the case.
Steps to reproduce:
Create a collection, we’ll call it test1_collection
Add at least 1 movie to the collection
Add the label test1_label to the collection, not to the media in said collection
Create two homeusers, or you can use two invited users, we’ll call them test1_user and test2_user
Change the permissions for the user test1_user to exclude movies with the label test2_label
Change the permissions for the user test2_user to exclude movies with the label test1_label
As the user test2_user, check the Collections section of the movie library and the collection test1_collection will not exist as expected.
As the user test1_user, check the Collections section of the movie library and the collection test1_collection will exist as expected.
As the admin user, pin the collection test1_collection to the Homescreen, Library Recommend, and Friends’ Home
As the user test1_user, you will now see the collection test_1 collection on your homescreen as expected.
As the user test2_user, you will now see the collection test_1 collection on your homescreen, which is unexpected as the tag test1_label which test_1 collection has is excluded from the user test2_user
Where things go off the rails is at step 11, if the user test2_user is excluded from seeing the collection, which is confirmed by checking the collection section of the movies library, then it should not show up on the homescreen or recommended section of the library either. However, it does.
If you want to share your content like this… it should be enough to whitelist the movies (e.g. label a movie as “applicable” to user_1, configure the account to allow only that label – instead of excluding all other possible labels).
If you want them to be able to see their favorite movies as a hub on their home screen / recommended page… it might be easier to go with a smart collection:
Create an advanced filter – sort by Rating, limit to 10 (no need to include an actual filter criteria… maybe exclude unrated items make the rating actually matter )
Save the resulting view as a Smart Playlist (from the Save As dropdown)
Edit the smart collection and set Collection filtering based on on the Advanced tab to User currently viewing the content
Publish / add that hub to the home screen of your friends
This way, you only need 1 collection and don’t have to tag which movies they like on their behalf (instead their rating matters).
All that being said… if the smart collection filter results in an empty list, the hub will still show on their home page.
In a perfect world, ratings would work, but I want this to be something that they cannot mess up. Family is great and I’m sure we all love’em to pieces, however, they are great at finding a way to break things. I’d rather not have to keep changing ratings because Aunt Rose and Grandma Jenny can’t stop accidentally changing the ratings.
You can still handle their access by using the Allow only labels option.
I’m not 100% what you want to achieve with your published collection on their home screen. Based on what I understand that’ll simply be a list of ALL movies you granted them access to?
If you stick with your own current approach, it’ll show a list of all movies they have access to but none of your other users… which is weird… why should user A not love a movie because user B has access to it too?
I guess what I’m trying to say… I’m confused as for what you’re actually trying to achieve.
(as BigWheel stated… “what’s the goal of this?”)
@tom80H What I want is for everyone to have access to all the movies. The only thing I am trying to limit is access to a collection, which works in the collection section, it is the pinning that seems to ignore this limitation.
Think of it this way, I want User 1 and User 2 to have access to all the movies in my collection. However, I want User 1 to have a custom collection that only they can access and the same for User 2. The only limitation is that of who can access these special collections.
Lets say I have an uncle that is a HUGE Matrix fan. I could create a favorites Collection called Tom’s Favorites and have it populated with his favorite films, including the Matrix movies. Now, let us assume that no one else is interested in this collection, I want to effectively hide this collection–not the movies, just the collection–from all the other users. Now the important thing to note is This Works but only in the Collections section of the movies library. It does not work if I pin them to the home or recommended sections. If I pin them there, the pinning seems to ignore the exclude.
To be clear, all the family members would be able to access all the movies in the library, I just want to limit who can see a few specific collections.
Make a smart collection based on Ratingis greater than4 stars
Save as a Smart Collection Call it My Favorites
Edit it under Advanced set Collection filtering based on to user currently viewing content
then publish that collection to Friend’s Home
That way any user that has access to your server can rate any movie on your server they want to show up in that row as 5 star and they won’t see things other people rated 5 stars. and you don’t have to continually and manually maintain multiple separate list.
@BigWheel Does this not rely on the user to properly rate things and not muck it up? Additionally, doesn’t that mean the user has to rate all those items, again, dealing with family here, so they are not inclined to do this all the time and are prone to mucking things up.
As for the maintaining the lists, that part I am not worried about as the list does not change very often.
I guess what you’re looking for is more something like what’s described in this suggestion:
Have your individual user collections but only pin those to the home screen of that particular user (avoiding to clutter the other user’s home screen)
@tom80H That is exactly what I want to achieve, however, if the pinning did not ignore the exclude, it would already work the way I am trying to do it.
In reality, that feature does exist, except for this bug that is preventing the pinning from obeying excluded tags for said user.
Again, you can see that it works as when you browse the collections section, the collection in question is indeed hidden for all except the admin and the intended user. So the feature/functionality works. The issue is just getting pinned items to obey it.
@BigWheel No offence, but you don’t know my family. If there is a way then it will get mucked. This really is the reason I went with plex years ago as I want to curate and present a unified interface. If I wanted the wild west I would have stuck with XBMC/KODI.
In this case I would prefer curation to be managed by myself as I know it is done right and can avoid calls/texts when they break things.
I would classify this as a bug and not a feature request.
Forget everything about ratings and favourites and whatnot. If something is excluded from a user via a label, then that user should not be able to see it no matter what. Period. It doesn’t matter if it’s on the homepage, recommended tab, collection tab, or anywhere else. It’s like a security/privacy bug.
@BigWheel Any chance this could get filed as a bug instead of a feature request. It would also close that other feature request that @tom80H mentioned.
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