I currently have about 40 libraries. The new interface makes that difficult. So, I wish to consolidate to far fewer libraries, assuming I can use “categories” for segmenting various types of content into smaller groups of content.
How do I accomplish this? I did a search for “categories” and found nothing.
Please help.
Categories within Plex are nothing but the Genre tags that appear on items. They are usually set automatically by the metadata agent. But you can add more or edit existing ones manually.
The Categories tab only appears for Plex pass owners and their managed users.
Another method to subdivide a library is by using collections.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201273953-collections/
I have gone through one of my largest libraries in order to delete any tags that somehow made it into the data that were showing up as “categories”. Having deleted all of those tags (none of which I set), the entries under “Catagories” are now all gone.
However, I also deleted all entries under “Collections” and yet many of them still show up when I go to “Collections” in that specific library. Yet, when I click on the collections there is no content that is called up.
I would like to eliminate all these bogus “Collections” tags so that I might use both “categories: and “Collections” to sort programs in large libraries.
How can I accomplish this?
For each library, in the advanced library settings, set “minimum automatic collection size” to disabled. I think you will still need to delete any that have already been generated, but it will stop more of them turning up.
Properly closing PMS will cause the database to clean itself up. Also if you are using plex web, you will need to reload the page to get the tabs to go away after all the genres or collecting have been removed.
This does not seem to work. I have deleted the tag information under “Collections” for all videos in this library, but remnants remain in my “Collections” tab. There is nothing linked to the Collections tile.
Shutting down my PMS has not resolved the problem. Any other ideas?
What do you mean by this? Maybe a screenshot would help.
By “remnants”, I mean despite the fact that I deleted all tags for “Categories” AND “Collections” they still show up as “Collections”. They display the tile I created, or show the name of the specific program, or the name of the orchestra and/or composer.
It is annoying that I cannot seem to delete these “things”, whatever they are.
The new PLEX interface is already cluttered with useless information and messy enough without having these problems.
Would that PLEX would have allowed us to retain the old software . . . or enabled “preferred” users to “disable” all this new junk.
Do you mean you still see the collection with 0 entries? If these were ones you manually created, they do not automatically clean themselves up. Sorry for the confusion. Instead of cleaning the label, just go ahead and delete the collection itself. This will not delete the contents, if there are any left.
I did delete several “Collections” that showed only one program, though it also reported “0” contents. When I deleted the “Collection”, PLEX also deleted the program (a symphony) from my Plex library.
The action did NOT delete the actual files, which is a good thing. But now I might have to reinstall the programs in the library when I do delete a collection.
Deleting a collection should not remove the movie from the library. That would be a bug I’ve never seen before.
