How to make a Plex collection visible to only one user

Short answer: Plex has no per-user collections, but it does have label restrictions. Give the collection a label, then tell every other account to exclude that label. What’s left is a collection only one person can see.

It works, it’s supported, and it needs Plex Media Server 1.43.2.10687 or newer plus a Plex Pass on the admin account. The rest of this page is how to do it, and the one mistake that quietly leaks the collection to everyone.

Why there’s no direct setting

Plex collections belong to a library, not to a user. Everyone with access to that library sees every collection in it. There is no “share this collection with Alice only” checkbox, and there never has been.

What Plex does have is a per-share content filter. When you share a library, you can restrict what that person sees by rating, by genre — and by label. That last one is the lever, because labels are something you control and Plex evaluates them per account.

So the trick isn’t making a collection visible to one person. It’s making it invisible to everyone else.

Why this only started working in 2026

Label restrictions have existed for years, but they weren’t applied everywhere. A collection hidden by label would still surface on the Home shelf, the Recommended tab, or in “Related” rows — so a “private” collection wasn’t private at all. This is why the technique didn’t reliably work before, and why older forum threads say it can’t be done.

Plex closed those holes in 2026:

Plex Media Server What it fixed
1.43.1 Label hiding applied to the Home and Recommended shelves
1.43.2.10687 Label hiding applied to Related rows

Below 1.43.2.10687 the exclusion is ignored in at least one surface, and the collection leaks. Check Settings → General on your server before relying on any of this.

The manual method

For a single collection shared with a single person:

  1. Label the collection. In Plex Web, open the collection → Edit → Tags → add a label, e.g. picks_alice. Use a prefix you’d never use for anything else, so you can always tell your labels apart from ones Kometa or another tool manages.
  2. Exclude that label from everyone else. Go to Settings → Users & Sharing, and for every other account with access to that library: edit their library access, find the per-library restrictions, and add picks_alice to Exclude Labels. (The exact wording shifts between Plex versions; you’re looking for the label-exclusion field under the shared library’s restrictions.)
  3. Leave Alice’s own share untouched. She’s the one person who should not have the exclusion.

That’s it. Alice sees the collection; nobody else does.

Two things that will bite you

The server owner can’t be restricted. Plex doesn’t apply share filters to the admin account — there’s no share to filter. If you’re the owner, you will see every labelled collection on the server no matter what you do. That’s a Plex limitation, not something to debug.

Movies and TV need separate rows. A collection lives in one library, and Plex applies label restrictions per library (filterMovies and filterTelevision are distinct). If you want someone to have a private row of films and one of shows, that’s two collections with the same label. A collection holding the wrong type for its library matches neither restriction — which makes it impossible to hide from anyone.

The ordering mistake that leaks

This is the part people get wrong, and it’s worth being blunt about it.

The obvious order is: create the collection, then add the exclusions. Don’t. Between those two steps the collection exists, is unlabelled or unexcluded, and is visible on the Home shelf of every single person you share with. On a server with 40 users that’s a window where 39 people can see a row built from someone else’s viewing habits — and Plex clients cache shelves aggressively, so “I fixed it a minute later” doesn’t necessarily un-show it.

The safe order is:

  1. Create the collection unpromoted — not on any shelf yet.
  2. Label it.
  3. Merge the label!= exclusion into every other account’s share filter.
  4. Only then promote it to Home / Recommended.

The collection is never simultaneously visible and unexcluded. Do it in this order every time, even when you’re “just testing”.

Merge the filter, never rebuild it

When you edit a share filter, read what’s already there and add to it. Plex stores these as a single string per library, like:

contentRating!=R,label!=picks_bob,label!=picks_carol

If you overwrite that string with just your own exclusion, you have silently removed someone’s parental-control restriction or another tool’s rules. Parse it, union your label into the existing label!= values, and leave every other condition byte-identical.

Snapshot the original values before your first change. It’s the only way to put a server back the way you found it.

Why this doesn’t scale by hand

The mechanism is sound. The arithmetic isn’t.

Every private collection needs an exclusion on every other account. For n users each with their own row, that’s n × (n−1) share-filter entries — 20 users is 380 of them, and each one is a read-modify-write against a filter string you must not corrupt. Add a user and you touch every existing share. Add a row and you touch them all again. Rebuild the rows nightly and it’s a non-starter.

Doing it by hand is realistic for one or two collections. Past that you want it automated.

The automated version

Shortlist is a self-hosted container that does exactly this, on a schedule. It builds a personalized “Picked for You” collection for each user from their own Plex watch history, labels it shortlist_<user>, merges the exclusions into every other account’s share filter, and only then promotes the rows to Home — in that order, every run.

It also handles the parts this page warns you about: it snapshots your share filters before the first change and restores them exactly on uninstall, it merges rather than rebuilds, it skips the owner, and it never modifies a collection it didn’t create (so Kometa keeps working alongside it).

docker run -d --name shortlist -p 5959:5959 \
  -v /path/to/config:/config \
  ghcr.io/stevezau/shortlist:latest

Set -e SHORTLIST_DRY_RUN=1 to see every change it would make to your server without writing one.