Shortlist ✨

A private, personalized "Picked for You" row for every user on your Plex server.

[!IMPORTANT] Shortlist is a brand-new app in public beta. It works and it's running in production, but you may hit rough edges. Please report bugs — open an issue with what happened and your Settings → System → Copy diagnostics bundle. Thank you for helping test it. 🙏

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 rows are the same for everyone and ignore what you've actually watched.

Shortlist fixes that, per person. For each user it looks at their own watch history and builds a personalized collection — "Picked for You" — of things from your library they haven't seen but probably want to, and puts it on their Plex home screen. 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 live "Picked for You" row on Plex Home — private to that user, built from their watch history.}

Why this couldn't exist before 2026

Per-user private collections were impossible until Plex fixed label restrictions on Home/Recommended (v1.43.1) and Related hubs (v1.43.2). Shortlist is built on that fix: each row is a labeled collection excluded on every other account's share, 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.
• 🧠 Smart picks, no hallucinations — an optional LLM (Claude / GPT / Gemini / local Ollama) curates and explains the picks, but only ever from titles verified to exist in your library. Works with zero AI too (heuristic mode) — no keys required.
• 🌐 Finds what to watch next from everywhere — pools candidates from TMDB, Trakt, your own library, and a live web search for current, well-reviewed titles (via the curator's own web search or an Exa key).
• 💬 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, curation style, and audience.
• 🗓️ Freshness you control — rows stay stable and refresh on a cadence you set (nightly → fortnightly), 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 (hit rate), per user and per row.
• 🧹 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, dark UI, GHCR multi-arch, healthcheck, Unraid template.

Screenshots

A ~10-minute setup wizard — connect Plex, pick users, go	Each person's row, and why each pick — "Because you watched…"
Watch every run — history → candidates → curate → deliver	Connects to what you run — Tautulli, Radarr/Sonarr, Trakt, LLMs

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

Quick start

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 \
  ghcr.io/stevezau/shortlist:latest

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.

Requirements: PMS ≥ 1.43.2.10687 · Plex Pass on the admin account · a free TMDB key. Optional: Tautulli, an LLM key. Details in Getting started.

Documentation

License

MIT © Steven Adams