Rows and templates

Starting from a template

Rows → Add a row opens a gallery rather than a blank form: Picked for You, Because you watched…, Happy to see again, Fresh finds, From the vault, Popular on this server, Movie night, More TV to watch, and Start from scratch. Each tile names the two or three settings it changes, so picking one also shows you which knobs matter. Nothing is locked in. Every field is editable afterwards, and the template is not stored on the row.

Naming a row

A row’s name can be plain text (“Hidden Gems”) or use a placeholder that fills in per person when the row is built:

• {library_name} — the library the row is built in. ✨ {library_name} Picked for You becomes “✨ Movies Picked for You” in your Movies library and “✨ TV Shows Picked for You” in your TV library. This is the default row name, so a server with several libraries gets distinct titles instead of two identical “Picked for You” rows.
• {user} — the person’s name. {user}'s picks becomes “Sarah’s picks”. That name is their nickname if you’ve set one (Users → open someone → “What to call them”), otherwise whatever Tautulli calls them, otherwise their Plex username. Which is often a handle nobody uses. Changing a nickname renames their existing rows on Plex; it never changes their label, so their privacy is unaffected.
• {top_seed} — the title that most drove their recommendations. Because you watched {top_seed} becomes “Because you watched The Bear”.

The seed is the strongest pick that came from something they watched. Some sources suggest a title without following one — what’s trending, what’s popular on your server, a web-search find — so those contribute picks but no seed. The name uses the strongest pick that has one.

If a {top_seed} row is built for someone with too little history to have a favourite at all, it falls back to a clean default (“✨ Picked for You”) rather than a half-finished sentence — or you can have the row not appear for them; see People without enough watch history below. You can rename any row at any time in the Row editor, and the collection on Plex is renamed in place, so its place in the shelf and its privacy are preserved.

A {top_seed} row needs one more setting to be honest. By default every row is built from a person’s 30 most recent watches blended together, so a row titled “Because you watched The Bear” is really “because you watched these thirty things, one of which was The Bear”. Set Row editor → Watches every source builds from to 1 and the row genuinely is what that one title led to. The editor prompts you for this as soon as a row’s name uses {top_seed}.

One catch, which the editor also tells you: seeds are shared out across the media types a row covers, and a single watch is either a film or a show. Never both. So a row set to Movies and TV with a budget of 1 seeds only one of them, and the other library’s collection never builds. For a row covering both, use 2 (one of each), or set the row to Movies only or TV only.

Watches every source builds from (1–100, default 30) matters on its own: it decides how many watched titles every discovery source searches from. Fewer means a tighter, more coherent row about a couple of things; more means broader coverage of someone’s taste. Watches the AI web search looks up is a slice off the front of that same list, and caps the AI web-search source alone.

There is a server-wide default for it in Settings → Finding titles, and any row can override it. The global stops at 5 while a row goes down to 1, because a single seed is a choice worth making for one row rather than imposing on every row at once.

Which watch a one-title row follows

A row built from one watch normally follows the most recent one, and stays on it until that person finishes something else. If they watch little for a fortnight, the row says the same thing for a fortnight.

Row editor → Which watch it follows changes that. Raise Recent watches to choose from above 1 and the row cycles instead: still one watch per row, but a different one each day, working through their last few and then coming round again. It cycles rather than picking at random, because a random pick repeats, and a repeat is indistinguishable from a row that has stopped working. Two people’s rows cycle out of step, so a whole server doesn’t rebuild on the same night.

The setting only appears on rows built from one or two watches. Above that a row is blending a whole history and has no single watch to follow. It is also not the same as raising Watches to build from, which is the setting people reach for first and the wrong one: that blends more watches into one row, diluting the very claim a {top_seed} title makes. Cycling keeps the row about one watch and moves which one.

Rows that follow a watch always refresh nightly, whether they follow it by name ({top_seed}) or by cycling. A row whose title claims a recent watch can’t be allowed to lag behind it: at the usual pace it would go on naming last week’s film for a week after the person moved on. So How often it changes is not offered on those rows at all; the row simply refreshes nightly. Every other row keeps the setting.

There is a modest cost to that. Refreshing nightly does not only mean “a write when the watch changes”. On the nights it hasn’t changed the row still swaps its weakest third for new titles, so it writes to Plex most nights, per person, per library, where an ordinary row on the default pace writes about weekly. It does not cost any extra AI usage: candidates are gathered once per run however often a row refreshes, so how often a row refreshes has no bearing on it.

People without enough watch history

Someone new to the server, or someone who barely watches, has too little history for Shortlist to recommend from. Settings → Finding titles → Enough watch history is where that line sits (10 watched titles by default), and the setting beneath it decides what those people get:

Either way it resolves itself: the row appears (or returns) on its own the night they cross the threshold. Nothing needs setting back.

Any row can override this in the Row editor, which is the point of having it per row rather than only server-wide. A {top_seed} row is the one worth skipping — it has no favourite to name itself after, so for a cold-start person it falls back to the plain default title. A general “Picked for You” row is perfectly happy holding popular titles in the meantime. Leave a row on Use the global setting and it follows Settings.

The person still appears on the Users page, flagged as needing more watch history — a row that is missing on purpose is never left looking like a failure. The run’s entry for them says how many titles they have watched so far and what was skipped. Shared rows are unaffected: this only governs the per-person ones.

The order titles appear in

Row editor → Order decides how a row’s titles are arranged in Plex:

Plex itself only sorts a collection by release date, alphabetically, or by a custom order, so every one of these is applied by Shortlist and delivered as that custom order, which is what the Home row displays.

Newest released and Just added are different things, and the difference matters: the first is about when a film or show came out, the second about when it joined this row.

Highest rated uses TMDB by default, which needs no setup. To sort on IMDb, Trakt, Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic instead, set Settings → Finding titles → Rate titles using. Those come from MDBList and need its API key (the same one the Requests feature uses). Without a key, or once MDBList’s daily quota is spent, the row falls back to TMDB for its whole ordering rather than sorting half the row on one scale and half on another.

Shuffled and Taking turns are the two with a cost worth knowing about. The other four are applied while the row is being written anyway, so they are free; these two reorder the row on Plex every day, including days when nothing about the row has changed. The whole row is ordered, and it is one Plex write per title actually out of place, per person, per night — so a row that barely moved costs a handful of writes and a row that turned over completely costs one per title. On a server with many people that is real write volume, so neither is on by default.

Both are stable within a day. Re-running a row the same night reproduces the same order, and two people’s copies of one row shuffle differently.

Just added only moves on the nights a row actually refreshes — on the other nights nothing has arrived, so there is nothing to put in front. How often that happens is How often rows rebuild, not this setting. If the front of a row feels stuck, the rebuild cadence is usually the dial you want, and Taking turns is the one that moves the front every night regardless.

Where a row shows

The Row editor → Where it shows grid picks which Plex screens a row appears on. Two surfaces, two audiences, and every one of the four switches is independent:

The columns are real, not cosmetic: every person gets their own Plex collection, so each switch is set on a different collection. You is your own row, and Plex’s Home shelf applies to the server owner alone. Everyone else covers the people you’ve shared with plus Plex Home members, whom Plex groups together under Shared Users’ Home. Each of them only ever sees their own row; everyone else’s is excluded from their share filter.

Turn all four off and the row still gets built and kept private; it claims no Recommended slot, and you’ll find it under the library’s Collections tab. One caveat: on a run where Shortlist can’t match an existing collection back to its row (a {top_seed} row that produced no picks, say) that row keeps its own Home flag for that run. It stays off the Recommended shelf, and it is only ever visible to the person it belongs to.

What this can’t do: hide friends’ rows from your Recommended shelf while leaving them on theirs. Share filters are what hide a row from someone, and you own the server, so there is no share with yourself to attach one to. So with Everyone else → Recommended shelf on, every friend’s row is on your shelf too. Turn it off (leaving Everyone else → Home screen on) and each friend still gets their row on their own Home, while your shelf stays yours. Shortlist shows this warning at the switch itself.

A common setup: You both on, Everyone else Home only. You get your row on your Home and your shelf, everyone else gets theirs on their Home, and nobody’s row clutters anybody else’s view.

Row placement (Recommended shelf)

By default Plex adds new collections at the end of a library’s Recommended shelf, so if another tool (like Kometa) manages collections on the same server, Shortlist’s rows can end up buried at the bottom. Settings → Row placement sets a server-wide default; you get three choices per library:

• Wherever Plex puts them. Leave the order alone (the default).
• Top of the shelf — put Shortlist’s rows at the very top. No anchor needed. (This replaces the old “pin to top” switch.)
• Right before / after a collection. Pick an existing collection and sit the rows next to it.

Any individual row can override the default in the Row editor (“Position in the Recommended shelf”), per library, so “Picked for You” can sit at the top while another row sits right after New Series. Since each person only sees their own row, moving rows up lifts everyone’s at once.

Behind the scenes Shortlist re-applies your choice at the end of every run (so a co-managing tool can’t re-bury the rows), only ever moves its own rows, and never touches the collection you anchored to. It works with or without Kometa. Kometa is only why this matters, because it fills the shelf, not how it works; the anchor can be any collection, Kometa’s or one of Plex’s own.

If you also run Agregarr

Agregarr arranges the same shelf, and it re-applies its own stored order roughly every 30 minutes. Shortlist re-applies yours at the end of every run and at the nightly privacy sync — roughly three passes a night against Agregarr’s forty-eight. So the two take turns, and Agregarr wins on volume: what you see during the day is Agregarr’s layout.

There are two ways to settle it, and both are configuration rather than something Shortlist can do for you:

• Exclude Shortlist’s rows in Agregarr, or stop its “Randomize Home Order” job, so it stops moving collections labelled shortlist_*.
• Set Row placement to “Wherever Plex puts them” so Shortlist never touches the shelf order and Agregarr owns it outright.

Either way your rows are still built, delivered and kept private — only their position on the shelf is affected. Shortlist tells you when this is happening: three passes moving the same row in a day raises the “Something else is reordering your shelf” notification.

Check which Agregarr you are running

The original at agregarr/agregarr is no longer actively released, and it has a bug that matters more than the ordering one: when it reorders a shelf it re-promotes every collection with Plex’s defaults, which puts them on the server owner’s Home — your Home, the one place no share filter can hide a row, because the owner account has no share filter.

Shortlist clears that flag on every run, so it is a gap between runs rather than something permanent — but the gap is as long as the time between your runs.

The maintained fork at bitr8/agregarr-dev (Docker image bitr8/agregarr) fixes it at the source. It is a drop-in swap — same config, same database. It still reorders the shelf, so the two options above still apply.

Row posters

Each row can have its own artwork on Plex. In the Row editor → Artwork, pick one of:

• Plex default — leave Plex’s own collection artwork alone (the default). Switching a row back to this after it had a custom poster reverts the artwork on Plex on save.
• Upload — upload your own image (a tall 2:3 poster looks best; up to 8 MB). It’s downscaled and stored, then applied to the row’s collection(s) on the next run.
• Text — a clean built-in poster: your Title and Subtitle over a gradient. No AI needed, works on any setup. Use {user}, {library_name}, and {top_seed} to personalise the text.
• AI image — an image generated from your text and Art style, using your AI provider’s image model. This reuses your AI provider’s key, so it’s available when that provider is OpenAI or Google (Anthropic and local servers can’t generate images. Use a Text poster or Upload instead).

Hit Preview to see a sample before saving. Generated images are made once and reused across runs (they refresh when you change the text or style), so posters don’t slow a run down or cost per user. Posters are cosmetic. A poster that can’t be made never blocks a row from building.