When an actor has more than one film set up in Plex, I want one pic of the actor on the main menu. When you click on it, a submenu comes up listing that actor’s films. How can this be done? I have tried setting up subfolder structures in windows but plex ignores them.
Just regularly add the files to your library, following the official naming schema.
If properly named/matched, Plex will give you an option to access „actor pages“ with their filmography, movies/shows in your libraries…
There’s no need to organize video files in actor/director subdirectories.
I’m looking for thumbnails of just the actor’s picture on the top menu. Then after clicking on the top menu picture the screen would show thumbnails of that actor’s movies that are on the server. There must be a way to do this. Otherwise you would end up with an unorganized mix of all movies on the server which would get ever harder to work with as more movies are added.
So you want an option to organize a library ba cast or directors (similar to artist view for a music library)?
Plex doesn’t currently have such a mode (given there’s already the Discover Credits pages mentioned above.
The next best thing could be creating your own smar collections, filtering for specific actors/directors.
Let’s say I have three movies on my server starring a single actor.
I’m trying to set up a library of those Movies. The library would be accessed by an image of that actor on the main menu showing only that actor’s name. Clicking on that image would bring up another menu listing all of that actor’s films that are on the server. Ultimately, I’m trying to figure out a way to organize that actor’s films, so they are not listed individually on the main menu. So I want to avoid having a main menu that will eventually show 30 films starring several different actors all on the same menu. Wouldn’t that look klutsy and disorganized?
I suppose that’s fairly subjective.
However… as pointed out above, Plex‘s approach is different. The closest you can get to what you’re trying to achieve is creating a set of smart collections for individual persons/actors.
- Filter your library by a specific actor using the library’s advanced filter
- Save the filtered view as a Smart Collection (this way newly added movies with the same actor/actress will automatically added to that collection)
- Edit the collection to assign the person‘s name as title and a poster of your choice
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201273953-collections/
Sometimes it can be easier not to turn a solution inside-out to make it behave differently from how it was designed.
1 Like
So I was a bit curious how this’d work so I tried one.
I built a Harrison Ford Smart Collection.
First I went to Library and created my search options:
And this was the partial result:
Well, I decided I wanted it to be chronoligical instead so I swapped the sorting (see the change from Title to Release date):
I then saved as a Smart Collection:
Once that was done I went and edited the collection and added some summary information from Wikipedia and a poster:
Works pretty snazy.
I have a few actors I might create that for but the “Discover” function works pretty well for me to just see other movies an actor is in while browsing (once the Editions bug is fixed). I could see where this could be useful for someone particularly for things like a favorite actor or for Directors or other crew roles that aren’t as accessible via the Discover functions.
1 Like
Creating a list of actors would only produce an unwieldy long list, that pretty much no-one would ever care to browse.
Let’s do the math:
The number of actors in an average movie varies between about 15 to 75.
If you add in all the other personnel that is usually involved, you get easily into the hundreds.
Now multiplicate that by the number of movies in your library.
Even if you take into account that people can work on several movies in their life time, you will still get a number with 5 digits – easily.
There are already several sources which can provide you with that kind of data. IMDb, TheMovieDB etc. It doesn’t make much sense to replicate that in Plex. Because it wouldn’t be used very much. And building a feature that won’t be used is a waste of time and money.
The above proposal to build a few collections for some of your favorite actors and directors does make much more sense, IMHO.
Insomnic_1’s solution is probably the closest the OP is going to get what they want.
However, Plex is one step away from making the OP’s dream come true, if Plex would allow Nested Collections as seen in that feature request. You could then create smart filters for the majority of these actors the OP wants a page for, then create one giant “FAMOUS ACTORS” collection that contains each of these smart collections. Then you can pin this collection to the Home Page, which would display a single pic of each "collection, which you could quick-select to see their movies. For more on this, see the “Add as a Recommendation Row” section of this article for how to pin the collection to your Home.
Of course, you can’t do a collection of collections NOW, but at least you know about making a one-level Smart Collection thanks to Insomnic_1 and now how to pin it to Home.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
