View Plex collections when browsing Plex libraries

So the only way to acess collections is to search for them?

they also show up in line within the library.

I feel there’s something very obvious I’m just not understanding. :sweat_smile:

In the context of Direct Mode, what do you mean by “or accessed inline when browsing movie and TV show libraries.” and “When browsing a library, collections will appear inline with your movies/shows.”

If it can help, here’s a screenshot of the settings of my current home screen on the Apple TV:


My “Favorites” section is two folders, one for all my movies and one for all my TV shows. I use them to be able to access a complete alphabetical list of all my movies/TV shows.

The screenshot you posted makes me think of what I used to see when using Library Mode if I had the setting “Group Movies Into Collections” enabled. Are you saying there’s a new setting somewhere to achieve the same kind of thing with Direct Mode? Because with Direct Mode I’m not seeing these “inline” collections anywhere currently.

I would also like to add that for me personally, not seeing these inline collections isn’t such a big deal. When I was using Library Mode I had “Group Movies Into Collections” disabled anyway, I was using the home screen instead to access my collections. I’m just trying to understand this newly released feature because I have a lot of movie collections in Plex and would love to be able to access them when using Direct Mode.

Please let me also just add that what would be very useful to me would be the ability to have a single row on the home screen containing all my movie collections. That’s really the only thing I want as far as collections are concerned.

Step 1 - Ensure that any Collections that you want to show up on the Home Screen in Infuse are setup correctly in Plex to display on Home Screen (basically if Plex Home Screen doesn’t have the collections enabled, they won’t show up in either client):

1.1 - Create the collection in Plex (you’ve done this)
1.2 - Ensure that the collection is “visible on” library and home


1.3 - Check in Plex that when you are in home, that you can see the library you’ve chosen. I’ve seen odd things happen when you try to rename collections, so instead of renaming, delete collection and create again.

Step 2 - Using Infuse, select/pin the collections you’ve created to home.
2.1 - Click on “Home” in the left hand sidebar
2.2 - Click this button in the top right hand corner
image
2.3 - Click “edit”
image
2.4 - Find the “Collection” you have created and click the green + to add it


2.5 - It will then show up under pinned items, click “Done”

2.6 - You can re-arrange the ordering on the home settings screen as you require, then click the X in the top left hand corner.

Here is the result, first the Home Screen view:

Second - The view when you click into the collection to view “inline”:

For me, the “library” items are of no use on AppleTV, as they only include items that are downloaded (nothing from direct mode shows up), and I think this is by design. So references to “library above” don’t really make sense to me.

What is handy, is that when you download content on MacOS or iOS, all downloaded content shows up in the library, making it very clear and simple about what is downloaded locally v available to stream from your server. In my case, I travel quite a bit, so have either unreliable broadband often or very expensive mobile broadband. So having a very easy way of seeing what is local and what is remote is useful. I basically renamed a few of the library items to “Downloaded - TV Shows” and also included them in my Home Screen.

Hope this helps you with what Infuse is currently able to do, might not be perfect, but for me that is enough to give me a few specific lists of content that shows up on my Home Screen.

@James - is this right, any corrections or improvements to my understanding would be welcome (this isn’t very discoverable, specifically on the Plex side of things).

Thank you for the thorough explanation.
I’m tryin to add a collection as a favorite ,and not a home screen bar.

After reading your post, I thought that making a collection “Visible on: Library” in Plex was maybe the missing puzzle piece to make a collection visible “inline” but no, it didn’t work for me. At least there’s nothing when I go to my main movie folder I designated as favorite.

But again, I don’t really want to see my collections inline like that, I basically just want to be able to easily access them from the home screen. So no big deal for me personally I guess, but I do really wonder why this new feature is so complicated and difficult to use.

As for making a collection visible on the home screen, I did create two “functional” smart collections to access my unplayed movies and TV shows some time ago when Direct Mode was released (see the screenshot of my Apple TV home screen settings I posted above).

And it works great, but this method is only useful for functional smart collections. For all my other 20+ collections that are basically just groupings of movies from the same series (e.g., Back to the Future movies, Scream movies, Indiana Jones movies, etc.) this method is kind of useless because it creates one row per collection. And I don’t want to have 20+ rows like that on my home screen… it would make a home screen that’s completely unwieldy and useless. Especially on the Apple TV.

Again, what would make sense is to be able to create one single row showing all movie or TV show collections in it. Like it’s already possible to do in Library Mode, basically.

I finally discovered why I wasn’t seeing “inline” collections anywhere in Infuse.

In Plex, there’s a Library option (Manage Library – Edit… – Advanced) called Collections. This setting needs to be either at “Show collections and their items” or “Hide items which are in collections”, depending on what you want to see.

Mine was set at “Hide collections but show their items”, that’s why I wasn’t seeing anything.

Makes sense, and I must say it’s pretty cool that Infuse is now respecting all three of these options. I just didn’t realize this new Infuse feature was directly tied to this (rather well hidden) Plex setting.

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Whilst my preference would be to have Infuse provide the ability to display content in Plex (direct) using filters specified in Infuse, having the ability for Collections to show up in Infuse is a workable second preference.

Glad you’ve found a solution for your needs!

(and yet another example of the somewhat cryptic Plex settings)

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