It’s Christmas in a couple of days and I have been requested to add a few Christmas films onto my server. But I have been asked to add films that are already on the server, a standard case of people being too lazy to have a look before asking.
The “On Deck” section of the plex experience is really cool for seeing newly added films and TV shows but I think it would really be awesome if there could be a “Seasonal” section for the On Deck.
Basically around December you would get a Christmas/Holiday films section where it would show all the Christmas films from your library, similarly one for each holiday that has films released around it. E.g. Rom Coms showing around Valentines day and horror films showing around Halloween etc.
This is how I do it. It’s a little work to set it up, but not too complicated. My hard drives are set up something like this…
Movies <-- Plex library for all movies points to this folder
Christmas <-- Plex library for all movies points to this folder. As well, a second library called Christmas points to this library. All movies with a Christmas theme go into this folder.
Halloween <-- Plex library for all movies points to this folder. A second library called Halloween also points to this library. Put the Halloween themed movies here.
etc, etc for other special occasions.
When I set up the holidays libraries, I also go into the advanced section, and disable the “Include in Dashboard” option. I do that so that Plex will not show double entries in the “Recently Added” sections and “On Deck.” Since the movies in the special library are already part of the regular movies library, new additions show up as expected, and a partially watched movie shows up in “Continue Watching” if you take this extra step.
For most of the year, I don’t share the holiday libraries with my users. A couple of weeks before the event, I edit the users and share that library, so that it appears in the library sections. (on the left hand side in Plex Web, for example) Un-share the library at some point after the event.
As the admin of the server, I see the libraries year round. If that would annoy you, you could simply delete the special library, and re-create it each year.
I’d like this too, but I’d be happy with an appropriate genre filter, if such genres exist to be tapped into. For example , Christmas/Festive/Holidays etc.
For big holidays like Christmas it makes sense to go through the effort of creating a separate library, assuming you have a large selection. This is what I do for Christmas movies. But TV episodes are harder because they belong in the folders with the rest of the series. So for episodes I create a Christmas TV playlist. This is worth it for Christmas, but it is too tedious for other holidays in my opinion. And I don’t want a million libraries on my main screen to scroll through (pro tip: I rename the Christmas Movies library to start with an _underscore which moves it to the end alphabetically during the off-season). It would be nice is Plex somehow had metadata to identify the season/holiday theme of a movie/episode.
