Shortlist

Per-user movie & TV recommendations for Plex — a private “Picked for You” row on every user’s home screen, built from their own watch history and visible only to them.
Self-hosted, one Docker container, no AI key required.

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Quick start · How per-user rows work · Tools compared · Ask a question · Report a bug

The problem: "what should I watch next?"

Everyone on your Plex server faces the same blank-screen problem — a huge library and no idea what to put on. Plex's built-in recommendation rows are the same for everyone and ignore what you've actually watched.

Shortlist gives every user their own recommendations. For each person it reads their own Plex watch history and builds a personalized collection — "Picked for You" — of titles from your library they haven't seen but probably want to, then puts it on their Plex home screen. Netflix-style per-user recommendations, self-hosted on your own server. It's private: each person sees only their own row, nobody else's. It refreshes automatically. It turns your library into something everyone can actually discover from.

_{A "Picked for You" row on Plex — private to that user, built from their watch history.}

It slots into the stack you already run. Reads watch history straight from your Plex server (Tautulli optional), pulls candidates from TMDB and Trakt, and hands gaps to Radarr/Sonarr — while leaving Kometa's collections completely alone. One container, no database of its own to run.

Why this couldn't exist before 2026

A row that only one person can see was simply impossible until recently. Plex had no per-user collections, and the "hide this by label" setting it does have wasn't applied everywhere — so a row meant for one person still showed up for others.

Plex fixed that in 2026: label hiding now works on the Home and Recommended shelves (v1.43.1) and on Related rows (v1.43.2). Shortlist is built on that fix — each row is labelled, and every other account is told to hide that label, so only its owner ever sees it.

Features

Personalized discovery

• 👤 A private row for every user — built from their watch history, visible only to them. One container serves your whole server. Including you: the server owner gets a row like anyone else, so Shortlist is just as useful on a one-person server.
• 🧠 Smart picks, no hallucinations — every pick is a title verified to exist in your library, never invented. No AI key required: the built-in picker runs entirely in code. An optional LLM (Claude / GPT / Gemini, or any local server: Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM, LocalAI) adds one extra source — a live web search for what to watch next.
• 🌐 Finds what to watch next from everywhere — pools candidates from TMDB, Trakt, and an optional live web search for current, well-reviewed titles.
• 🔎 Web search that works with any model, even offline ones — Shortlist runs the search itself, so your model never needs internet access. Works with a local Ollama box just as well as with Claude — via your provider's own web search, an Exa key, your own self-hosted SearXNG, or a combination. How it works →
• 💬 Explains itself — every pick says "Because you watched X".
• 📚 Watches whole shows, not episodes — a 20-episode binge counts as one show, and it looks back through your full history so both movies and TV shape the picks.

Make it yours

• 🎞️ Multiple rows per person + shared rows — e.g. a personal row, a "New this week" shared row, per-library rows — each with its own sources, size, libraries, rebuild cadence, and audience. Start from a template — Because you watched…, Happy to see again, Fresh finds, Popular on this server and more — rather than a blank form, then change anything you like.
• 🚫 Block a bad seed — a film someone put on for a friend shouldn't shape their picks. Block it from a run's "How we picked" page; the watch stays in their history, it just stops seeding.
• 🗓️ A rebuild cadence you control — set it in days (nightly, weekly, monthly, or never), so people aren't shown a totally reshuffled row every day.
• 📍 Row placement — choose which Plex shelf each row lands on (Home, the library's Recommended tab, or both) and where it sits, per row.
• 🎨 Custom row posters (optional) — upload artwork or generate it from text, reusing your AI key.

Grow your library

• 📥 Fills its own gaps (optional) — when a great pick isn't in your library, Shortlist can ask Radarr/Sonarr to grab it. Off by default and cautious: the strongest picks auto-send (a few a night); the rest wait in a Requests inbox for one-click approval.

Trust & safety

• 🔒 Private by design — share filters are snapshotted before the first change and fully restored on uninstall; rows are delivered hidden and only revealed once the exclusions exist.
• 📊 Know if it's working — a dashboard tracks what was delivered versus what people actually watched, per user and per row — and separates a title they started from one they finished, so a single episode of a series stops scoring like a whole film.
• 🧹 Kometa-friendly — never touches collections it didn't create.
• ↩️ Provable uninstall — one flow restores your server exactly as Shortlist found it.
• 🧪 Safe mode — set SHORTLIST_DRY_RUN=1 to try it against your real server without writing a single change, until you're happy.
• 📦 Homelab-native — one container, /config volume, GHCR multi-arch, healthcheck, Unraid template.

Screenshots

Each person's row, and why each pick	Watch every run, step by step

_{App screenshots use placeholder titles (a test library); the Plex row above is a real server.}

Where it fits

Shortlist does one narrow thing the rest of the stack doesn't: build a different collection for each person and keep it private, inside Plex. It's designed to sit alongside what you already run:

• It never touches what it didn't make. Only collections carrying Shortlist's own shortlist_* label are ever modified — Kometa's collections, and anything you built by hand, are skipped.
• It can be told to stand aside. Every row also carries a plain shortlist label, so a tool that reorders the same shelf can exclude all of them with one entry — Agregarr's Exclude from Ordering (Plex Label), for instance. Or turn Shortlist's own shelf ordering off entirely.
• It merges share filters, never rebuilds them. Existing conditions are left byte-for-byte identical, and the originals are snapshotted before the first change.
• It connects rather than duplicates. Tautulli for richer history, Radarr/Sonarr for gaps, Trakt and MDBList for candidates — all optional. Only Plex and a free TMDB key are required.
• Plex-only. The privacy model depends on Plex's label-based share filters (PMS 1.43.2+), so there's no Jellyfin or Emby equivalent to port to.

Curious how the per-user privacy actually works? See How to make a Plex collection visible to only one user.

Quick start

You'll need: somewhere to run a Docker container (it does not have to be the same machine as Plex, just able to reach it) · Plex Media Server ≥ 1.43.2.10687 · Plex Pass on the admin account · a free TMDB key. Optional: Tautulli, an LLM key. Shortlist ships as a container only — there is no standalone Windows/macOS/Linux installer. Details in Getting started.

With Docker Compose:

mkdir shortlist && cd shortlist
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stevezau/shortlist/master/docker-compose.example.yml
mv docker-compose.example.yml docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d

Or with docker run:

docker run -d --name shortlist \
  -p 5959:5959 \
  -e TZ=Etc/UTC \
  -e PUID=1000 -e PGID=1000 \
  -v /path/to/shortlist/config:/config \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  stevezzau/shortlist:latest

Also on GHCR as ghcr.io/stevezau/shortlist — the identical image, same tags, no pull limits if you'd rather avoid Docker Hub's.

Then open http://your-host:5959 and follow the setup wizard — it connects your Plex account, picks your server, and walks you to your first rows (about 10 minutes).

💡 Want to try it without touching your server first? Add -e SHORTLIST_DRY_RUN=1 — Shortlist will show you exactly what it would do and write nothing to Plex.

Documentation

📖 stevezau.github.io/shortlist — the docs as a website.

How Plex itself works

Background on the server, not on Shortlist — worth reading before you build anything on this yourself, because most advice on the subject predates Plex's 2026 fixes and quietly leaks.

Support the project

Shortlist is free and MIT-licensed, and built in evenings. If it saved you some, you can sponsor it on GitHub — entirely optional, and it buys time rather than features on request.

Bug reports are worth just as much. The Have an issue? page runs read-only checks that often name the cause outright, then opens a pre-filled issue with a secrets-free diagnostic to attach.

Not sure it's a bug? Ask in Discussions → Q&A. Answers there get marked as answers, so the next person searching the same problem finds one.

License

MIT © Steven Adams