Noticed something interesting while searching for collections. I saw some of my collections had a nifty nested feature where collection I had named the same within my Movies/TV sections would nest into one another with a little (1) on the search results (cool!)
I also saw that some collections I had setup in the same fashion would be split apart with one collection being shown for the “movies” and another for the “shows”. Going into either collection would show the results of the other collection as I would expect but the collections would never nest within one another in the search results.
So did some testing and found:
The nest collections only occur if it’s a collection that was created by or exists within whatever Plex pulls its collections from. If it’s something custom created or doesn’t get created with a metadata refresh it won’t nest.
I wonder if it’s something that could be fixed by creating collections with those names in the location plex pulls that metadata? Or if it’s something that could be a feature suggestion of allowing “Custom Collections” with the same name to link to each other in the same way as the automagically created collections.
I suppose that „aggregation“ you’ve seen in the search results is based on the auto-created collections having the same online metadata guid. So Plex might be treating it the same as e.g. different-quality versions of the same movie in different libraries or different editions of a movie in the same/different libraries.
That guid is not editable in the user frontend, so you cannot currently „force“ Plex to treat manually created collections to be considered as „the same“ (despite showing same-named collections in different libraries as „related items“.
There’s already an existing suggestion asking for an option to „match“ manually created collections, therefore deriving their respective descriptions, posters… and guids from The Movie Database. I consider this would also achieve what you’re looking for.
