The Problem

Sometimes you have a collection of movies on your Plex Media Server and you would like to group them together. Maybe there are just a lot of them - like 9 Harry Potter films. Or maybe their names don't group nicely if you are sorting alphabetically - does "Batman Begins" go in the "B"s or in "D"s for "Dark Knight." If only you could group them together nicely, similar to how TV Shows are grouped. You can. Let's do it.

Plex Collections

Movies can be grouped together with a Plex feature called Collections. To use collections your server must be running Plex Media Server version 1.11.0.4666 or newer, which it almost certainly is at this point.

Adding a Title to a Collection

To add a title to a collection first open up the edit menu for the title by clicking the pencil in the lower left corner.

In the edit menu, go to the tags tab.

At the bottom will be the Collections box where you can enter the name of the collection that the title belongs in. If you want to create a new collection, type in the name and hit Enter or click "Add [collection name]" when it pops up. Click save changes and your new collection will be created.

Once you have the collection created you can repeat the process for all the other movies in the collection and they will all be grouped together.

How to hide movies in a collection from showing up individually

After you add movies to a collection by default they will show up both in the collection as well as individually. This is not what most people want. The whole point of grouping them is to be more orgainized and having things in two places is quite cluttered. Let's fix that.

Setting to inline collection movies by library

This is option is set on a per library basis. So go to your Movie library->Manage Library->Edit.

Once you open the Edit Menu, go to the Advanced tab.

Find the Collections drop down and change it to "Hide items which are in collections."

Setting to inline collection movies by collection

If you have a specific collection where you want to override the library inlining default, you can do that as well. Start by going to the collection that you want to change. Click the pencil to open the edit menu.

Go to the Advanced tab again.

There will be another drop down menu for Collection Mode where you can select to override the library default for collection inlining.

How to Delete a Collection

If you have a collection that you want to delete, it only takes a few clicks. Start by navigating to the Collection that you want to delete. Click the "..." to bring up more options. Click delete in that menu. You will be asked to confirm that you actually want to delete the collection.

How to Remove a Title from a Collection

If you want to remove a specific title from a collection go to the edit menu for the title, then open the Tags tab (same steps as to add the movie). In the "Collections" option of the menu remove the collection that you want to take the title out of.

How to Automatically Add Movies to Collections

Go through all of your movies and setting up collections can take a lot of time, especially if you have a lot of movies. You can tell to Plex to automatically sort movies into collections when you add new titles. The following was added in Plex Media Server version 1.20 so if you have a lower version make sure you upgrade.

To get started, head back to the edit menu for your movie library. Go to [Movie library]->Manage Library->Edit, just like in the inlining steps In the edit menu, make sure the Scanner and Agent are set to "Plex Movie."

Then scroll down in the same menu and find the "Minimum automatic collection size." This drop down box will allow you to select the minimum collection size. I think 2 is probably a good number because a collection with one thing in it is pretty sad. So set that to 2 and then when you add new content Plex will search to see if you have other titles in the same collection and if you do it will make the collection and add titles for you.

This only works for titles that you add, it does not automatically re-sort your current library. In order to tell Plex to try and sort your current titles into collections, go to [Movie library]->Manage Library->Refresh All Metadata. This will go through all titles and refresh everything and sort into collections. This can take a while.

From what I've seen of automatic collection sorting, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. After you refresh, you will probably have to go through and make some corrections. But it's a lot better than doing everything yourself.