You’re not wrong that you can’t combine separate libraries together. The only row that does that is the “continue watching” row - a special row Plex created. There’s generally a good reason for this separation for folks managing local content and every media management software does it this way (though some will let you combine similar libraries - so if you have two TV libraries you can make a “combined” version but it takes some manual work). But as you can see it’s a common request.
There is a way to adjust things with Plex so you can get some of what you want within the structure provided.
Totally doable. You can create a manual collection or a smart collection or you can even do it automatically. Check out this article about creating collections.
For MCU if you don’t want to build it yourself and like how TMDB has put their different Marvel collections together (including artwork and metadata for the collection) you turn on the automatic collection feature and it’ll build that for you automatically. I don’t think there is one all encompassing Marvel one but there are ones for like Avengers and other subsets.
I don’t like the auto collection feature myself so I don’t have that on but I do use manual and smart collections. I have a Marvel manual collection and I have it sorted by release year - but you could manually sort it if you’d prefer. I have Star Wars and Star Trek collections and LOTR collection and Die Hard and John Wick collections and Bond collections (a few different ones). They can overlap but that can be a little funny sometimes and you can choose to display titles only in their collection in the Library view or as the individual titles.
I also have a few collections that are smart collections that automatically build themselves based on search filters. I have a couple for some favorite actors so as long as a movie is in my library with that actor - it shows up in that movie collection (Cary Grant for example). Or I have an Anime collection that automatically collects titles with the anime genre (which I have to add myself sometimes) to make them easier to find in one place.
And that relates to:
You can customize the rows on the Home Screen in your settings. In the Manage->Libraries section of your server settings you can turn off and on specific rows and re-order them.
And Collections can be added to those rows.
So here’s how those can work together.
I ordered my libraries in the order I want those library rows displayed on Home (that’s how it works out). Depending on your app you can either move them around manually or the order you favorite them in determines the order they get displayed.
Then I turned off rows I didn’t need and turned on rows I wanted and ordered them per library (see previous screenshot).
So, on my Home Screen I have the following rows:
- Continue Watching
- Recently Added in TV Shows
- Recently Added in Movies
- Recently Released Unwatched Movies (*)
- Random Not Watched Recently (*)
- Random Nostalgia Action Movies (*)
- Recently Added in Anime Shows (this is just a dedicated TV library for subbed anime)
Those three rows marked with * are custom collections I created and added to my Home Screen. They work great!
I turned off all the rows for TV Shows library except for Recently Added. I turned off all the rows for Movies except for Recently Added in Movies - and I turned off the built in “Recently Released” row and turned on that custom smart collection that does the same thing except it doesn’t show titles that have been watched already; works better for me than the built in one. The other two custom ones are pretty similar and build a random collection of 30 movies based on parameters - one is for titles that have never been watched or haven’t been watched in 3 years so that some older titles just bubble up and the other randomly loads titles from the Action genre released in 80s/90s/00s (both have a few little fiddles to reduce some content like no documentaries and such).
One neat thing is you can set some of these ones based on watched status or play count to the user account so my friends\family to use my Plex get results relative to their account in those rows that use watched status.
You can see in the first screenshot how I customized those movie rows specifically. Once you set the visibility option on the smart collection it’ll show up there to turn on or off or re-organize.
By doing this those custom rows now remove a lot of decision fatigue when people are just wanting to find something to watch and don’t have anything particular in mind. Much easier than trying to scroll through hundreds of movie titles in the Library view.
One reason I stick with Plex over Emby or Jellyfin is that those other platforms don’t have this feature to create smart collections or customize the Home Screen with your own rows (Emby is supposed to get it in v5). I really like this feature and it’s not really promoted much.
Now one problem you may run into is if you have lots of different libraries - then it gets really cluttered. You can merge the “recently added” function for multiple like libraries. I personally don’t like that but it might help reduce some row clutter in that case.
Otherwise, I can only recommend merging libraries in that case - which is easy enough to do but you’ll lose historical data; moving files around in the same library will keep data but separate libraries treat titles separately - another reason to combine libraries sooner rather than later. Plex used to kinda recommend splitting up libraries to manage 4k vs SD titles or sharing controls but most of that has been worked out in other ways (version management and labels for example).
