Feature Request: Add “People (Actor) Gallery” as a Primary Library View

[AlexLai 1]

Emby already has a well-structured People metadata system, including actor images, credits, and individual person pages. However, from a UI/UX perspective, actors are only accessible through item detail pages and lack a dedicated browsing entry point.

## Current Limitations

1. **Deep navigation path**

   * Current flow: Item → Actor → Person page
   * No direct way to browse all actors

2. **No actor-centric browsing**

   * Users cannot explore the library by actors
   * This limits content discovery, especially in actor-driven libraries

3. **Underutilized metadata**

   * People data is already well-maintained
   * But lacks a corresponding gallery-style UI

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## Proposed Feature

### 1. Add “People” as a top-level library section

* Alongside Movies / TV Shows / Collections
* Entry opens a grid-style actor gallery

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### 2. Actor Gallery (Poster Wall)

Include:

* Grid layout with actor images
* Sorting options:

  * Number of appearances
  * Recently added
  * Alphabetical
* Filtering:

  * By media type (Movies / TV)
  * Tags / Favorites
* Search support

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### 3. Optional Enhancements

* Actor statistics (appearance count, last added)
* Categorized filmography display

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## Implementation Feasibility

This feature should be relatively lightweight to implement:

* People metadata already exists
* Requires:

  * Aggregated People API endpoint
  * Frontend gallery view
* Can reuse existing poster wall UI components

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## User Value

* Improves content discovery
* Enhances UI completeness
* Aligns with user expectations from other platforms
* Particularly valuable for actor-centric libraries

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## Summary

This is a **low-cost, high-impact** improvement that leverages existing data and significantly enhances user experience.

Thank you for your ongoing development of Emby.

I believe this enhancement would bring meaningful improvements to both usability and feature completeness, and align well with user expectations.
I sincerely hope it can be considered for inclusion in a future release.

[ebr 16386]

 

[AlexLai 1]

12 hours ago, ebr said:

 

Thank you for providing the link to the previous discussion. I think this feature could be added, but it should be disabled by default, allowing users who need it to enable it themselves.