Better Organization for Playlist Categories

📋Summary

Introduce a new Playlist Category tree—similar to the existing Platform Category tree—that allows users to create collapsible, customizable categories to organize playlists. This would offer a dedicated space for grouping playlists by themes (e.g. “Seasonal”, “Progress”, “Genres”) without misusing platform-based structures.

This separation would improve scalability, clarity, and usability—especially for users with many non-platform-specific playlists.

❗ Problem

The Platform Category tree in the sidebar allows you to group platforms together by collapsable platform categories as follows:

This organizes the platforms, but there’s nothing like this for unique playlists. In the Playlist tree, there’s simply the following:

This means,

Automatically generated MAME playlists fill up Playlist, making it difficult to use
For users with lots of unique playlists, Playlist becomes unmanagable
Platform Category can be used to achieve this, but using “parent” categories that are not platform specific in Platform Category will create clutter

💡Proposal

A new Playlist Category tree in the dropdown. This way, you can have unique groupings for playlists that aren’t necessarily platform-specific.

The following is an example of various horror themed playlists grouped together under a custom, collapsable tree:

While using “Seasonal Playlists” as a “parent” in Platform Category is possible, a Playlist Category tree keeps the Platform Category clean and focused on platform specific organization, while Playlist Category is used for more abstract categories.

✅ Benefits

Categories like theme, progress, etc. can all be used as “parents” for grouping playlists, providing more flexibility
Better management of playlists that aren’t platform specific
Allows Platform Category to remain responsible for organizing platforms while Playlist Category is responsible for organizing playlists.
Provides better scalability for users with lots of unique playlists

VodkaParalyzer

•

Jan 5

I love the flexibility that one has, with how you can curate your game collection within LaunchBox/BigBox, through things like Playlists. But I agree with the original poster, that much of what I’ve achieved has been through misusing the various Platform Category, Platform, and Playlist entities currently available to us. This is primarily due to not being able to nest a Playlist under another Playlist. Instead, you have to use a Platform Category to achieve this.

For example, I have a Platform Category called “Collections”. It houses the various Playlist collections that I’ve created. Under this, I have other Platform Categories, some of which in turn have more Platform Categories. I have a Platform Category called, “By Year”. Within that, I have Platform Categories for each decade, from 1970s to 2020s. And within each of these, I then have separate Playlists for each year within that decade.

If things are changed, I hope that there could also be an option to also convert things that people have already created, to any new entities, rather than having to recreate things from scratch :)