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