Is it possible to prevent specific movies from auto-creating collections

[swarnock89 1]

Hey everyone. So I do like the auto-create collection feature. I think it helps to declutter the library. However, I have specific movies that I do not want to be put into a collection.

The movies in question are part of the MCU. Things like the Iron Man movies and Thor movies. I have created my own collection called 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' and I have manually added all of these movies to that collection. However, they still create their own Iron Man and Thor collections. I have not found a way to make specific movies not auto-create collections. Is this possible?

[Smitty018210 159]

I don't think so, but I wish to god there was. 

[Luke 42528]

HI, yes I think it would be nice to have a way to opt out of this.

[Smitty018210 159]

4 hours ago, Luke said:

HI, yes I think it would be nice to have a way to opt out of this.

Is this something someone could create plugin for?
Maybe one that shows a master list of Collections with show/hide button?
Would that be something that could work? 

[Smitty018210 159]

17 hours ago, Smitty018210 said:

Is this something someone could create plugin for?
Maybe one that shows a master list of Collections with show/hide button?
Would that be something that could work? 

@luke 

[swarnock89 1]

I was also thinking that Emby must use some type of metadata for creating the collections. If we could see that info in the metadata manager and have the ability to clear it, and lock it as we can with other metadata, we should be able to keep this from happening. 

So Iron Man for example must have an Iron Man collection somewhere. Expose that to the metadata manager. I could then erase the Iron Man collection, while keeping my manually created Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

[Smitty018210 159]

18 minutes ago, swarnock89 said:

I was also thinking that Emby must use some type of metadata for creating the collections. If we could see that info in the metadata manager and have the ability to clear it, and lock it as we can with other metadata, we should be able to keep this from happening. 

So Iron Man for example must have an Iron Man collection somewhere. Expose that to the metadata manager. I could then erase the Iron Man collection, while keeping my manually created Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

Emby creates a folder for each Collection that is saved in the metadata folder in your server folder. That is also where collection art work is saved. Even if you delete those folders Emby just recreates them.

They only way I have ever been able to stop collection that I did not want from being created/recreated was to edit each movie metadata to remove TMDB IDs so that Emby can not use them to recreate collections.

I do not like to have to do that as I don't want to unlink TMBD from metadata. (You can no longer update movie metadata) b/c Emby has no id to pull info from. 

Edited May 2 by Smitty018210

[Luke 42528]

On 5/1/2026 at 11:42 PM, Smitty018210 said:

@luke 

I don't think so, plus it would be better to stop it from being created to begin with, rather than trying to hide it afterwards.

[Smitty018210 159]

2 hours ago, Luke said:

I don't think so, plus it would be better to stop it from being created to begin with, rather than trying to hide it afterwards.

I may be wrong, but based on what I know about collections, they are created when a library scan is done and Emby looks for TMDB Collection IDs.

One way I could see to stop collections from being made is for Emby to first create a collection, and then have a way for users to mark/delete that collection so that it is not created again. That ID could be saved to a log somewhere, and then when a scan is done, Emby could look at potential collections to be made, run them against that log, and stop them from being recreated.

Would that work? Or is that just way overcomplicating it?

[Luke 42528]

Right, yea, there are multiple ways of getting it done.