Smart collections

A manual collection is a list you maintain. A smart collection is a description you write once:

• Comedies starring Matt Damon
• Marvel Studios releases after 2010
• Unwatched recordings from the last 30 days
• Everything added this month, rated 7 or better

The server works out what belongs every time the shelf is drawn. Add a film tonight and it is on the shelf tonight, with nothing to refresh and nothing to rebuild.

Making one

＋ Collection, give it a name, and choose Smart instead of Manual. That opens the rules editor.

Each rule is a sentence you fill in:

Match  [ All ▾ ]  of the following:

  [ Genre ]   [ is any of ]   [ Comedy ]                    ✕
  [ Actor ]   [ is any of ]   [ Matt Damon ]                ✕
  [ Released ] [ after ]      [ 2010 ]                      ✕

  ＋ Add rule

  Matches 12 items   ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ …

The count and the poster strip at the bottom update as you type, so you can see whether a rule does what you meant before saving. Nothing is saved until you press Save.

Match All means every rule has to be true. Match Any means one is enough. Within a single rule, several values are an “or”: Genre is any of Action, Comedy matches either.

There is no nesting. One Match toggle across the rules, several values inside a rule. That is deliberate: it stays understandable, and it stays operable with a TV remote.

What you can match on

Field	Options	Notes
Library	is any of	Restrict to one library
Genre	is any of, is none of
Actor	is any of	Picked from the people actually in your library
Crew	is any of, with a job	Director, Writer, Composer, and the rest
Studio	is any of
Released	after, before, between, in the last N years
Rating	at least	0 to 10
Title	contains
Added	in the last N days
Watch state	is any of	Unwatched, In progress, Watched

Two more controls sit under the rules:

• Sort. How the shelf orders itself. The same options as anywhere else.
• Limit. Cap it at, say, 20, and you have a “20 newest science fiction” shelf.

Genres and studios match by name, so they survive metadata being refreshed. Actors and crew match by person, so two people with the same name do not get mixed up.

What ends up in it

Films, shows, and recordings. Individual episodes never match on their own, because a rule that matched episodes would put 22 cards on your home screen for one show. A show matches on its own cast, crew, genres, network, and dates, and represents its episodes.

A show counts as:

• Watched when every episode you have is watched
• In progress when some are watched or one is part-way through
• Unwatched otherwise

That is the same definition Keep Watching uses, so the two never disagree.

Watch-state rules are per person

This is worth understanding, because it surprises people.

A smart collection is evaluated for whoever is looking at it. A shared collection called “Unwatched Marvel” legitimately shows different films to you and to your partner, because you have watched different things. That is what makes the rule useful. A rule with no watch-state in it looks identical to everyone.

Editing one afterwards

The shelf’s ⚙ → Edit rules reopens the editor. There is no add, remove, or reorder on a smart collection, because its contents are not a list anybody typed. If you try to add something to one from a title page, it will tell you rather than silently doing nothing.

Everywhere else

Smart collections behave like any other collection once they exist. They can be a home shelf, be arranged or hidden, be the source for the big banner at the top of the home screen, be played or shuffled, and open into the poster grid.

The rules editor itself works on every platform, including Apple TV and Android TV, where each part of the sentence is something you click into and pick from a list. Dates are a year stepper rather than a keyboard.

When to use which

• Manual for a curated order that only a person could decide. A marathon night, a trilogy in the right order, “films to show Dad”.
• Smart for anything you would otherwise keep having to update. Anything by a director, anything from a decade, anything you have not watched yet.