When you edit a Collection and go to Advance, there are three ‘Collection order’ options; Release Date, Alphabetical, and Custom. It would be helpful if ‘Random’ was another option.
Currently, I have to make two collections to get the desired effect. I have to make my initial collection, like “Favorite Movies” that is personally made. Then I have to create a Smart Collection…
I have to go to Advance Filters, add a ‘Collection’ filter for “Favorite Movies”, change the sort order to “Randomly”, save it as a Smart Collection, re-upload all the artwork and descriptions, change the initial Collection title so the new Collection has the correct title and then make it visible on my Home screen.
Perfect, even though I now have a duplicate collection on my Collections tab and every time I add a movie it has to be added to the initial collection with the incorrect title. It’s just a lot of hassle for something as simple as changing the sort order to random.
Edit: I could imagine people wanting to sort in other ways, like Release Date being reversed but I’m focusing on sorting randomly since I think more people are making custom Collections like “Best 90s Movies” and adding it to their Home screen. So having Collections appear random seems like the best option for more discovery instead of seeing the same movies first.
why not use stars instead of creating that initial basic collection? then you only need to filter on 5 stars movies when creating the smart collection and then you only have one collection and it will dynamically add any movie you rate 5 stars.
That is a good suggestion… but I would feel much more confident with a Collection never being accidentally deleted than a star rating never being accidentally changed. And if I start using star ratings to mean other things it will still feel like it’s a workaround, though a much easier one. Still that’s only one collection out of the dozens I’d still have a problem randomizing. But I’ll give the star ratings idea a try, thanks (Though I’ll have to keep my Favorite Collection since I don’t fully trust star ratings. So I’ll still end up with two collections haha).
This only applies to the one special case of a collection of favorite movies. But what about other collections? I have lots of collections for genre, keywords and other stuff, which are automatically generated.
I would like to place some of them randomized on the home screen, but it’s just too much work to create smart playlists for each of them. And then I’d have to manually change the arrangement on the home screen from time to time, because there is no way to let Plex automatically pick some of the collections and put them on the home screen whenever Plex is starting up to make it a bit more dynamic.
So giving us the option to have normal collections in a random order would be at least a good start in my opinion
I understand, like I mentioned it was only a suggestion for a “favorites” type of collection. I did not mean to suggest all things could be handled similarly.
It’s been some time since this suggestion was brought up. I feel it’s worth mentioning there’s a number of similar/related suggestions which already cover that specific use case in a wider context. Specifically there’s one suggestion thread discussing an option to have all library sort options available to sort a collection in ascending/descending order – including the option to sort it randomly.
I suggest you comment/vote in that thread to avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes from each other.
