Ability to create custom collections using folder view

[IAmHugh]

I suggest adding folder view and the ability to select a folder and add all it's movies to a collection instead of only 
having the ability to select movie by movie to create collections. The later makes it take so much longer to create 
a collection than necessary. Look at Emby's folder View and you will see what I mean.

Good example of why this would be great is myself I have All Alien and Predator movies in one single collection, 
I have all A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies in one collect, and there are more than a few 
other collections like this.

[TIMFLIX1138]

There is an plugin called Auto Collections which should handle what you are trying to do. There's no official thread here, just this one I created mostly for my own personal musings. It works well but for myself I use it to generate an initial collection file from a specific parameter and don't have it do much more as I tned to manually currate my collections from there.

As an aside, depending how your brain works at some point having seperate folders for your collections of media may lead to other problems with library expansion. For myself, I've moved to all movies in a main folder by first letter, each on their own drive location, for ease of finding and sorting well over 7,000 titles. But the I still have 1 drive with a folder where I keep Star Wars and Spielberg films, and on my J drive I have a sub-foldre called James Bond where all the Bond films go. So I guess I'm a freak hybrid haha!

Overall I wish JF could handle Collections in a much simpler method with just some pasic parameters for each. As noted in my sig wish list, just being able to set a parameter for a folder, or director, or tag, then let JF auto-populate from the databse, no matter what changes are made to the media, would be ideal! This can already be done through other sort methods, it's just implementing that process into a specific Collection format. Dare to dream, I guess.

[IAmHugh]

Unfortunately Auto Collections is exactly what it claims. At least om Emby the plugin is just that.

[TIMFLIX1138]

I'm not sure about auto collections on emby, I just used the plugin for JF here. Perhaps it can't create from path/folder? Again from my experience tat isn't the way most media managers look to sort things, but it's also not something I've looked that hard into.

For myself the biggest "trick" I use is custom tags in the metadata. Once it's there it's there and they are so easy to make, add new ones and can create pulls through various apps. Then the file folder structure doesn't matter so that can change how ever it may down the road (and for me has several times). Just native JF doesn't create collections based on tag (yet). The auto collection plugin can though.

Adding a tag field to your metadata in a cry once type thing and not overly difficult especially if you have metadata saved locally in teh NFO file. Can even be made into a batch process through Notepad++. I have a long list of all my custom tags and then just add the correct ones to any new media when I add and currate that and then never think about it again. In Kodi my MCU list just works through a smart playlist. In JF I had to do that manually for my collection but the autocollection plugin could have done it as well (it did for all my movie awards collections).

Then you can also manually edit the collections XML files (if your server is accessible to those program data files) and since 10.10 you just rename the boxset file, rescan your Collections library, then undo the rename to make it "right again, rescan once more and all your manual updates are there. Unfortunately JF removed the easier "just edit the XML, save and rescan" ability with 10.10, but the work around isn't super horrible.