Right now, it’s a bit difficult to go through all of my movies. I know I can create and sort by collection, genre, etc., but it doesn’t help when browsing for movies to watch. What I’d like to do is group, for example, all the Harry Potter movies together. Or all the Star Wars movies together. Right now, they take up an inordinate amount of space. Is there a way to configure Plex to have them in a sort of subfolder that expands when selected?
Yes in your library settings Manage library -> Edit -> Advanced -> Go to the Bottom you see Collections set to ‘Hide items which are in collections’. Or if you use ‘Kometa’ (you should its great) you can set ‘collection_mode: hide_items’. This way you have one poster called Harry Potter and then inside its all harry potter movies.
That second solution you mentioned is what I’m after. The first just hides the movies which isn’t the goal, we still want to know that they’re an option, just not take up 40 slots of Marvel movies. They’re all pretty much the same.
This Kometa thing…does it have to be run on a PC? We currently use a PS5 for Plex, but if this is a player side UI tweaker, I imagine that’s not gonna fly on a closed system like a PS5.
No it’s server side. You can run it on same PC/server the Plex media server is on
You can scroll through a list of collections in your library
Both of those solutions are the same thing. You need to create collections (or check the “automatically create collections” option) in order to pare down all the movies from being shown directly in the library. You can also create your own smart collections for Genres and Decades in order to make it easier to find something to watch. All these can also be ‘pinned’ to the top of the library by adding special characters to the beginning of the “sort name.”
I’ve also split out my libraries by regular/animated for both TV and movies so Movies, Animated Movies, Television, Animated Television. It works pretty well for me and I have about 3k movies at this point.
Yep I create smart collections and then hide them from the main library exactly like you described. Once I passed 2K movies I really needed collections to make it easier to find things to watch
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201273953-collections/
I definitely remembered this was a feature when I had my server so I had to look it up. A Smart collection is most likely what you want to set up.
I add a common Collection tag (item Edit > Tags > Collections) to entries I want to group together, you can also assign multiple Collection tags to assign them to various groups. It’s tedious to setup because you can only tag them individually, but once they are they’ll show as a collection named by the tag.
If you want to exclude them from your general library, the only way I can think of is to move them into a directory not under it and create a separate Plex library entry pointing at it.
