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Emby Server - Option to Auto Add to Collections Based on Path/Attribute Matching Rules


funwithmedia

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funwithmedia

(Edit: To indicate that this might be thought of as a "Smart Collections" feature, perhaps similar to Smart Playlist functionality.)

 

I'd love to see an Advanced setting, or a Plugin, that enables a List of Rules (which can be manually reordered by the user) that would match whatever pattern is defined in the rules for auto-adding items to a given Collection. These patterns could be set to match the file path (eg, match on "*\Disney\*" to match all videos with a folder "Disney" in their file path, and then add them to this Collection) or to match various item attributes, in particular Tags (eg, match if the video contains the Tag "Disney").

I could live without the following addition, but since there might users who will want to use pattern matching, but also want to be able to manually exclude certain items, perhaps we should also have the following: When a Collection is created there could be a default Final Rule (ie, the Rule which gets applied last, and thus has "final say") which would be "User manually Adds/Removes an item from the Collection." The user could of course move this Rule to not be final (which then would mean that the other pattern matching would take precedence), but whenever it is left as final it would mean that even if an item would normally be added to this Collection because of matching a path pattern (or attribute match), if the user manually removes it from this Collection then that manual action will take precedence (ie, the software would basically be making an internal record to exclude this specific item since the user manually removed it).

 

I'm imagining that the rules would get applied whenever a Library scan is performed, but it doesn't really matter to me how exactly things get triggered as long as it is automatic. ;)

 

Here's an example of how all this would work....

 

Say I have folders with the following paths:

\media\Videos\Shorts\Disney\CD1-Disc01

\media\Videos\Shorts\Disney\CD1-Disc02

\media\Videos\Shorts\Disney\CG-Disc01

\media\Videos\Shorts\Disney\CG-Disc02

 

And I want to populate the following Collections automatically:

Shorts

Disney

Donald Duck

Goofy

 

I would create each of these Collections, and use the following corresponding rules per Collection to determine what each Collection will get auto-populated with:

 

Shorts:

Match Path "*\Shorts\*"

Match Tag "Shorts"

 

Disney:

Match Path "*\Disney\*"

Match Tag "Disney"

 

Donald Duck:

Match Path "*\CD1-Disc*"

Match Tag "Donald Duck"

 

Goofy:

Match Path "*\CG-Disc*"

Match Tag "Goofy"

 

I know there is the Auto Box Sets plugin, but I'm wanting to add the same item to multiple Collections based on path and other attributes (particularly Tags), which as far as I can tell is way beyond how the Auto Box Sets plugin works (particularly given that many of my Collections are going to be of my own creation as opposed to Collections which have a TMDb collection id).

 

I think that this functionality could be quite useful if implemented well. And perhaps some of the underlying code (eg, for a rules system, etc.) could be modularized/reused for other requested features (eg, maybe Smart Playlists?)?

 

Thanks for your consideration!

:)

 

 

PS - If this is something you might like to see implemented, be sure to "Like" this top/first post (as well as any subsequent posts in this thread that highlight particular aspects of what you are interested in) -- "Liking" the top/first post helps the Devs to know how much interest there is in a given Feature Request.

Edited by funwithmedia
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We're planning on doing a smart playlists feature in the future, so this kinds of sounds like a smart collection variation.

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funwithmedia

Cool, yeah, I wondered if this might overlap some with that (Smart Playlist functionality). Hopefully that makes it more feasible (and likely) to implement this ("Smart Collection" functionality).

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  • 3 years later...
adminExitium

Plex added this in their latest release so you can start expecting more requests for this soon. It works brilliantly and makes managing (or adding) collections very simple.

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