Queuing Up Items to Watch Later in Plex Server

It is incredibly frustrating that there is no good way in Plex to click a button to add media to a “hopper” for watching later.  I have a collection of hundreds and hundreds of movies.  Some I have watched part way through (and thus are automatically marked as either “read” or “unread” depending on whatever loony logic the Plex code uses).  Some have been added recently.  Some are favorites.  Some I simply want to remind myself I want to watch again without having to search through hundreds of titles to find them (or just remember I want to watch them again!).

None of these things really allow me to access these particular movies/shows quickly.

I have spent hours looking for a solution, and finally I have discovered the ONLY (seems crazy, huh?) way to do it, at least from the actual Plex Media Server (not one of their apps for a web browser or phone/tablet).

The short of it is this: you need to add the particular title to a COLLECTION.  Then, you can use a FILTER to find those particular titles.  You can’t add Collections to a Library, or your front page, or anything that would make SENSE, you can ONLY access a Collection via a filter.  It’s a pain in the *ss, but it’s the only way!

Here’s how accessing the collection works:

HOME > LIBRARY (click the library you want: movies, television, etc.) > OPTIONS (the three bars at the upper left will expand the side bar on the left) > COLLECTION (whichever collection listed under “FILTER” that you want shown).

You can add titles to a COLLECTION by either typing in the name of a Collection in the appropriate field of the title’s settings (where you view all the fields associated with a title), or you can go to the top-tier of the library (MOVIES, for instance), click SELECT ITEMS from the tool menu bar on the left (it’s the square with a check mark icon), then tick all the movies you’d like to add to a Collection.  Finally, click the icon of the folder and plus sign in the tool bar on the left, and select the COLLECTION to which you wish to add the titles (or create a new Collection).

Furthermore, once you do this, you should be able to access a “Collection” from your Roku, so you can relatively easily go to a list of your “queued” shows.  From the main Roku screen select the Plex channel > select a library from your Plex Library Sections > scroll down to “By Collection” > choose the Collection you want.  It’s a lot of hoops, but it’s the only way!

Unfortunately, since Movies and Television shows are stored in separate Libraries, you can’t access all queued items from one list (Collection).  You must view queued Movies and queued Television shows from their respective Libraries (totally ridiculous).  It’s also much harder to “bulk” add television shows since they are stored in sub-locations where the “select” option is not available (thus you have to add single shows to a Collection by typing the Collection name into the field under that particular show’s settings).

Turns out you can only add an ENTIRE SERIES to a collection.  You can’t add just a single episode, thus this method is worthless for adding single television episodes to your queue (again, REALLY Plex?  REALLY?!).

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