I often find myself wishing it were easier to browse search results in the plex clients … more like looking through a collection. I wish I could pin a “search results” “library” to my plex favorites list and always be able to go back and browse my most recent search results easily and without the need to re-enter the search text, which can be painful on some players.
I take it you don’t mean the Recent Searches “search history”? Although… isn’t that covering what you’re asking for?
This may make more sense on the PC apps than on dedicated streaming devices, since we don’t manage and curate our collections from streaming devices.
A recent example for me was that I’d realized that I had added a number of Three Stooges films and TV shows but I had not yet created a collection for them. A search showed (most of) them, but only in a drop-list form instead of in a form where I could do something useful like select the stooges shows and mark them as belonging to the new Three Stooges collection.
More generally, I have learned to like the way collection content is presented and it seems like it should not be difficult to have a sort of ‘ad-hoc’ collection pinned to my favorites that always contains the results of my most recent search. Then it would be trivial for me to poke through whatever I searched for at my leisure.
I know I can filter a single library by many things, but (a) that is only for a single library at a time, whereas Search spans libraries and (b) often there are so many “things” (e.g. Actors) that it is far easier (and faster) to use Search – even with input as painful as on my Roku to enter the actor name.
So no, I’m not looking for the ‘Search History’ list to re-enter a previous search, I’m looking for a far, far better presentation model for the search results. And, if I have a choice, a model that is persistent – until the next search replaces the content.
Plex have since re-introduced the full search result page which is not limiting your results to the dropdown results page. If you click on “Show All”, you’ll find the “good old” result page grouping your results by different media types (e.g. movies, shows, episodes, collections…) – allowing you to select items and e.g. add them to a playlist or collection.
I suppose this is addressing what you were asking about?
That’s better than the drop-list, but I was hoping for search results that could effectively act like a collection and remain persistent until I do I new search. In essence a temporary collection created by search matches.
Of course, if the current search results had an option to create a collection from them, that would do. (smile) And of course, that collection would automatically be found in…
…It would be great to have a library type for Collections (and I would love to have an option to automatically populate it with all existing collections, including those created from search results).
And finally, Collection images could include some sort of media counts (12 movies, 7 TV shows, 3 music albums, etc.) to provide an idea of what they may contain when we create our own [i.e. strange (smile)] collections.
The search page remains – unless you change the search term, it’ll show the same result.
There’s also the search history which lets you easily access previous searches.
You can already do that.
For single results you can use the Add to context menu.
For multiple results you can multi-select the results and use the Add to button from the multi-select action bar. While those items are in the same library, Plex will offer you an option to add them to a collection (in that library).
Isn’t that what the label below the poster shows?
OK, I’m probably drifting too far from my original thoughts but…
It is nice to know that any user on any Plex app can create a collection from their search results by selecting all of the matching items.
Oh, wait… you said that doesn’t work because, although collections can now include items from different libraries (and library types) that isn’t supported using the procedure you described. So, you are saying it still cannot be done, except in a VERY limited way. OK.
The label below your example posters should only a single media type. But what I was requesting was an actual list of the numbers AND TYPES of media contained in a collection. For example, my MCU collection currently shows “28 Items” (instead of any specific media type, as yours show) when I view the collection from the Movies library, because there are 28 Movies in the collection. Well, that’s movies in the ‘Movies’ library, I also have an animated movies library and the collection contains one of those (not shown or counted in the poster label) as well as several TV series from two different TV Libraries, again, none of which are listed or counted in the posted label.
If I look at the same collection in one of the TV libraries, it shows as having only “7 Items” (once again, it DOES NOT show the items as TV Shows or Episodes) and it omits all of the OTHER TV Shows as well as all of the movies from the poster label.
There really, REALLY should be a library type of “Collections” where the collection poster labels would show all types of media contained and ALL collections could be found in a single place, without the need to hunt them down in specific libraries where they may have been created. But, like I said, that is probably a different feature request entirely.
Frankly, I’ve forgotten what I started this with once it was apparent that partial work-arounds were the best I could hope for. So I stopped dreaming and let my hope die.
