Collections

A collection is a named shelf of titles from anywhere in your library. Marvel films in release order, everything you own with Peter Sellers in it, the Christmas pile.

There are two kinds, and picking the right one is the only decision.

Kind	Who sees it	Who can edit it
Personal	Only you	Only you
Shared	Everyone on the server	The owner, or anyone on your network

Everyone can make their own personal collections. Only the owner can make a shared one, because a shelf on everybody’s home screen is a decision about everybody’s home screen.

My Favourites is a personal collection that already exists. It is what the ☆ on a poster adds to, and it cannot be deleted.

Making one

The ＋ Collection button in the top bar. Give it a name, and if you are the owner, choose personal or shared.

You will also be asked whether it is a manual collection or a smart one. This guide is about manual collections, where you choose what goes in. Smart collections define a rule and let the server keep the shelf up to date; they have their own guide.

Adding and removing

From any film or show: ＋ Add to and pick the collection, or make a new one right there. The same option is in the long-press menu on a poster, on every platform.

Inside a collection, the ◀ ▶ buttons on a card move it, so you can put the trilogy in the right order rather than the order you happened to add them.

Removing something from a collection does nothing to the title itself. Deleting a collection does nothing to the titles in it.

Managing one

Each collection shelf has its own ⚙ for renaming it, deleting it, and setting how it sorts. Manual collections default to Custom, which is the order you put them in. Change it to Title, Date Added, Release Date, or Rating and it re-sorts without disturbing your manual order underneath.

Sort is per person. Your ordering of a shared collection is yours.

Playing a whole collection

The ▶ and 🔀 buttons on a collection play it straight through or shuffled. Shuffle shuffles titles, so a series contributes its next unwatched episode and then continues in its own order rather than being scattered.

That builds a queue, which you can then see and reorder while it plays. See Playlists and queues.

Arranging your home screen

Every row on the home screen can be moved or hidden, and it is per person. ⇅ Arrange in the top bar.

You get a list of your current rows with move up, move down, and a hide toggle on each:

• Keep Watching
• Playlists
• Live TV
• One row per library
• One row per collection, including My Favourites

Drag your Christmas collection to the top in December. Hide Live TV if you do not have any. Hide a library you never browse from the home screen; it is still there in search and in the library grid.

Two useful details:

• A new library or collection lands at the bottom of your arrangement rather than jumping into the middle of it.
• Your arrangement follows you. Set it in a browser and your Apple TV has it too, because it lives with your profile rather than with the device.

The large artwork banner at the top is not a row and cannot be moved. What it draws from is a per-profile setting in ⚙ Settings, where you can point it at recently added, top rated, recently released, or a specific collection.

On TVs and phones

Everything here works on every app. Creating, renaming, deleting, adding to a collection, and arranging your home screen are all available on Apple TV, Android TV, iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web. The TV versions use a list with move up and move down instead of dragging, because dragging with a remote control is miserable.