With Collections, I use to be able to hide items that were a part of a Collection, so if I went to my Library page, it was ONLY collections. It seems that is still an option with Smart Collections, however, it doesn’t work. Items in Smart Collections are still visible on the Library page (even though they’re in a smart collection).
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I mentioned that briefly in your parallel post.
With smart collections you can only decide if they’ll be displayed inline within your library or not. The items inside a smart collection are not impacted and will always display.
The advanced tab of the collection is currently displaying the visibility settings as they exist for regular collections. From what I understand those will be revised with a future update to bring them in line with the actual functionality.
Hmmm, so when editing the filter how do I hide the items in the smart collection for my library?
You cannot… smart collections don’t impact how their items are displayed.
Edit the Library/Advanced/Set the Global Visibility for Collections there (and see if that works).
My Library and Collections were set to ‘Hide’ before the transition to the new agent, so it is unknown what will happen in a library edit/advanced - ATM (until you tell us).
Even if you do happen to get things set the way you want them - ONLY YOU (Admin Account) will be able to see what’s in a Smart Collection. Shared Accounts will see nothing in a Smart Collection. <----a bug not repaired in SIX releases:
Do we know if this is planned for the future?
I understand that’s the intended behavior – not sure if there’s going to be some changes in the future.
Can we request that this change is made to bring Smart Collections (which, logically, are just a dynamic type of collection) in line with the static ones?
The whole point of Smart Collections is that they are dynamic, and do not require effort to update. I do not see any other semantic difference between them and their more pain-in-the-bum brethren, and can only conceive that the reason it isn’t implemented is due to how the current collection hiding is implemented in software. I can’t see why it would be a difficult problem to solve, though.
As an example: I have created a dynamic collection of James Bond movies (writer = ‘Ian Fleming’). More will be added as they are released, and indeed there are a lot of them so more will be added as they are ripped from my physical collection. I would like the movies to only appear under the ‘James Bond’ collection, so as there aren’t ~25 similar films bloating the library. Currently I can only do that by creating a static collection and manually updating it every time something is added.
Perhaps a more current example in the 21st Century – although not really my cup of tea – would be all Marvel films, or a subset like all the Avengers movies, in a dynamic collection.
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@Blankedy Completely agree, and your examples are pretty much exactly what I intended to do.
I just finished “smartin’ up” my collections (so I don’t have to manually add new titles to them)… only to find that they will not “hide items in this collection” (even with library settings and collection settings toggled to do so). And this is the intended behavior, not a temporary bug? If so, consider my mind boggled. That’s one of the main reasons to use collections (group and organize titles).
Please allow smart collections to hide titles. It’s the only sane thing to do. Also, please fully bake new features before releasing (the setting to “hide items” is clearly present but does nothing, which is frustrating, along with the time wasted).
Update: I added a regular collection under same name as smart collection, and it does not appear, they kind of “merge” (which is probably another bug and temporary), but for now acts to hide items.
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I can’t seem to replicate at my end, unfortunately. It does sound like a bug though.
I’ve given up and am now using regular old static collections. Plex have really shot their smart collections feature in the foot here — as you say, organising titles into groups and then hiding those titles but showing the group is the use case for collections. In their current state I’m not really sure what problem they solve.
This topic can have the server-synology tag removed, as it is entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand.
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