Nested Collections

[user84 46]

Glad to see there is a request for this! Sad to see the first mention was in 2017.

[Landoman 20]

Count me in. Most basic functionility in any organising is the subfolder, virtual or otherwise.

[Landoman 20]

On 14/02/2024 at 01:04, Landoman said:

Count me in. Most basic functionility in any organising is the subfolder, virtual or otherwise.

The funny thing is that no-one thought about this when developing an application for organising media.....

Edited March 12, 2024 by Landoman

[rbjtech 5282]

7 Years later ... 

... Not having nested collections is REALLY beginning to hinder emby now that list sites such as trakt and mdblists are providing hierachy based collections such as Oscars etc.

I'd love to be able to click an Oscars collection and then show all the years as sub-collections as an example ..

Edited November 16, 2024 by rbjtech

[Luke 42077]

4 hours ago, rbjtech said:

7 Years later ... 

... Not having nested collections is REALLY beginning to hinder emby now that list sites such as trakt and mdblists are providing hierachy based collections such as Oscars etc.

I'd love to be able to click an Oscars collection and then show all the years as sub-collections as an example ..

I think you could accomplish this by combining features that we currently have, meaning use tags for one layer, collections for the next. Additionally the upcoming smart views/playlists feature may help with this because it will offer more control over where the category gets placed.

[rbjtech 5282]

14 hours ago, Luke said:

I think you could accomplish this by combining features that we currently have, meaning use tags for one layer, collections for the next. Additionally the upcoming smart views/playlists feature may help with this because it will offer more control over where the category gets placed.

Thanks. Smart views sounds interesting and if I can use the contents of a collection as a row/virtual library - then that would be perfect, but I don't believe it resolves the nested collection issue I'm afraid.

If I'm in 'movies/films' for example then I just want to click on the root collection - oscars, or a franchise or 'universe' (star wars, mcu etc) and then see all the associated further collections under that.     I shouldn't have to resort to using tags or any other mechanism to do that.

As it used to work (or be 'allowed') was tbh perfectly fine - you had to do it via the API but at least it worked - now, I guess it's been blocked - but for me personally, it never caused any problems.

[Smitty018210 143]

I can not believe, after 7 years, this still hasn't been added back to emby. How hard can it be?

Edited November 18, 2024 by Smitty018210

[aodfan 3]

Looking into this feature, hope it gets added back, it would make a huge impact.

[hemsimmons 0]

Voting for this please!

[robert powell 8]

not exactly a collection, but you can add collections to playlists. maybe that would accomplish something similar to what your wanting?

[user84 46]

Any traction on this?

[Smitty018210 143]

7 minutes ago, user84 said:

Any traction on this?

It's been nearly 8 years ..... So no I would imagine not. Sadly.

[Luke 42077]

This is easy to enable if you just want to add a collection to a collection. We tried this years ago, but user feedback was that you wanted the child collections to be hidden in favor of the parent, and that it was unacceptable without that. So that's why it had to be disabled until that could be done.

[Smitty018210 143]

45 minutes ago, Luke said:

This is easy to enable if you just want to add a collection to a collection. We tried this years ago, but user feedback was that you wanted the child collections to be hidden in favor of the parent, and that it was unacceptable without that. So that's why it had to be disabled until that could be done.

You are correct. I would want it hidden.

[rbjtech 5282]

16 hours ago, Luke said:

This is easy to enable if you just want to add a collection to a collection. We tried this years ago, but user feedback was that you wanted the child collections to be hidden in favor of the parent, and that it was unacceptable without that. So that's why it had to be disabled until that could be done.

Personally, never had an issue with this - as you just name the sub-collection (or the sort-order) with a prefix that puts it 'last' in a normal sorted order.     When you open the main collection - you only see the sub-collections anyway - so that works just fine.      Not hiding the sub-collections is not a good enough reason to disable this functionality imo.  Hide would be nice, but not essential.

Edited April 11, 2025 by rbjtech

[Smitty018210 143]

6 hours ago, rbjtech said:

Personally, never had an issue with this - as you just name the sub-collection (or the sort-order) with a prefix that puts it 'last' in a normal sorted order.     When you open the main collection - you only see the sub-collections anyway - so that works just fine.      Not hiding the sub-collections is not a good enough reason to disable this functionality imo.  Hide would be nice, but not essential.

Completely disagree. Either do it right or don't do it at all.

Doing something halfway will only cause more issues down the road for the devs

Edited April 11, 2025 by Smitty018210

[rbjtech 5282]

8 minutes ago, Smitty018210 said:

Completely disagree. Either do it right or don't do it at all.

Doing something halfway will only cause more issues down the road for the devs

I guess if you are happy to wait a lifetime for features then sure - those of us who used nested collections before were perfectly happy with the compromise.

Maybe add back as API created only (as it was previously), that way - only the more advanced users can use it and they are aware of it's limitations.

Edited April 11, 2025 by rbjtech

[Smitty018210 143]

16 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

I guess if you are happy to wait a lifetime for features then sure - those of us who used nested collections before were perfectly happy with the compromise.

Maybe add back as API created only (as it was previously), that way - only the more advanced users can use it and they are aware of it's limitations.

Agree to disagree.

I don't wont devs to half measures this and say well that's "good enough" and then forget about it/move on.

This should have been fixed YEARS ago. The fact that it isn't is incredibly sad. 

 

Edited April 11, 2025 by Smitty018210

[rbjtech 5282]

1 minute ago, Smitty018210 said:

This should have been fixed YEARS ago. The fact that it isn't is incredibly sad. 

This I do agree on.

[user84 46]

5 hours ago, Smitty018210 said:

Completely disagree. Either do it right or don't do it at all.

Doing something halfway will only cause more issues down the road for the devs

Looks like you are getting your wish.

How to do this "right" is often the opinion of the user, and often differs by user. I'd rather have the option that I have to tweak, than no option at all, which is what I have now.

Edited April 11, 2025 by user84

[Luke 42077]

7 hours ago, rbjtech said:

I guess if you are happy to wait a lifetime for features then sure - those of us who used nested collections before were perfectly happy with the compromise.

Maybe add back as API created only (as it was previously), that way - only the more advanced users can use it and they are aware of it's limitations.

There are some challenges as well with being able to click play or shuffle on the collection and being able to expand the items from the collection into a list of media, all within the context of a single database query and while supporting all of the content restriction features that we support. It is already extremely complex, and so to take that and then add the requirement of collections within collections would be a job. I think if it were reenabled at the api level, I'd be 50/50 about whether or not they'd actually play as you'd expect them to.

[GrimReaper 4739]

Haven't revisited this in some time, related discussion in another topic made me remember. 
Any movement on this, @Luke? 

If this:

On 4/12/2025 at 8:10 AM, Luke said:

being able to click play or shuffle on the collection

 

On 4/12/2025 at 8:10 AM, Luke said:

I think if it were reenabled at the api level, I'd be 50/50 about whether or not they'd actually play as you'd expect them to.

is the only concern, I reckon there's an easy compromise that I'm sure (mostly) everyone would agree on: make the ability to play/shuffle available only in the lowest/deepest collection, i.e. if no sub-collection - retain current behavior; if sub-collection present - hide play/shuffle on parent collection; ditto for sub-collection within sub-collection, however many layers you want to implement. There's no need to add/consider additional logic or necessity for further complexity, the only criteria should be: nested collection present yes/no? Play/shuffle available no/yes. And ultimately only collection containing items would be playable, just as it currently is. 

My 2c

Edited October 31, 2025 by GrimReaper

[Luke 42077]

I don’t have any new info yet sorry.

[user24 312]

Having some form of Nested Collections would be great!

I'd be quite happy with just two levels (e.g. Master Collection and Sub Collection). This would probably be enough to do 95% of the collection groupings I would like. I could then reduce 600+ current collections to about a dozen master ones and ideally see the sub collections within these.

Showing/hiding the sub collections in certain views would also be great, but if this is a large technical hurdle to overcome, then at least having the nesting ability in some form or another would probably be better than nothing at all (e.g. show master collections, followed by sub collections).

Play/shuffle from the sub collections, and not the master collections, would also be fine for me (though I get that this may not work for everyone).

• Would only 2 nested levels make the technical implementation any easier?
• How many levels does everyone who wants nested collections practically need?
• How many levels would suffice for the majority, as opposed to waiting a lifetime?

Once the new smart features (views/collections/playlists/whatever) are available then I think my collections/playlists will increase greatly, so perhaps Nested Collections (in whatever guise Emby can easily implement) will be a good next step...

[ginjaninja 605]

I have different types of collections which users would appreciating consuming separately when browsing if possible. and i as curator would appreciate showing separately. Perhaps a more simple use case for something akin to 'nested collections'.

• Reccomendation Collections - "For Alex" "For Dave"
• List Collections eg "BFI Top 100" 
• 'Boxsets' as created by TMDB/Emby eg "Star Wars Collection"

If i could put collections in different subfolders "collection types" that would be great.