A Permanent Director Category

[chemdep1980]

I'm looking for a way to include a Director category for my films that has some permanence and that spans across all users.
The latter quality means (I think) using Collections won't work for me.

I do know that I can search by director, get an image, and it will show all of the films we have by that director. That's actually pretty marvelous. I would love some sort of permanent way to include something like that in, for example, the Home menu or as one of the drop-down options when a person goes to Movies. I know that I can add John Wu as a genre and then select that. That's a nice option. 

What I would really love is to have a screen where there are all of the directors that I have chosen with all of their films underneath them. This is where Collections might be nice, but that's for each user. I want this across all users. 

I don't see a clear way to do this directly within JellyFin menus. Is there a hidden or back-end way of doing it? Is there a plug-in that might help? I'm a little skeptical of plugins. I remember from my heavy Minecraft days that a plug-in can do wonders or wreak havoc on a server.

I've seen similar posts but not exactly, so I thought I'd ask. Any direction of ides would be most appreciated. Cheers!

[TIMFLIX1138]

I was in a similar situation as I come from Kodi and could easily use Smart Playlists to create a whole section that is just a list of all the movie directors in my library and then a sub-list of each of their works collected. Unfortunately at the moment Jellyfin doesn't work in such a manner (that I have found).

My solution: Collections.

It's both amazing and also a massive PITA. But what I've ben able to put together (and keep growing) looks pretty good.

This is a now very old view into what I've put together.







https://i.ibb.co/CzRRmpd/JF-Collections-06.jpg



Pros: Universal across all users given accesslean look, Collections allow you to include multiple types of media (movies, TV Shows, albums, photos).

Cons: Not easily transferable as each entry relies on the specific filename and path for each entry. If you make an update to some part of that the change will not be updated in the collections. Different libraries are grouped into the same media type (all movies in one, rather Movies and Documentaries like the libraries are). Can be slow to load at times. Nothing native in JF to generate these with ease.

There is a plugin that can help to create the initial collections but I only really used it for all my movie awards categories as a starting point. Then I do most everything else manually. There's a few tricks to working with the XML files for the collections I could share as well. All the images I've currated and created myself as well. 

My user signature has my JF wishlist with some requests for collections and I've made a few feature requests on the JF request page. No idea if any will/can be implemented in future versions. Here's hoping, but until then this is the best method I have found.