My Templates — the rules, which are the actual feature
A saved design does nothing until it has rules. This is where a template stops being a picture and becomes a policy.
Auto-create: on or off
This is the first decision and it changes everything below it.
| Off — a personal poster | Keeps its own saved art, recalled by hand, hidden from Automate Artwork. No rules, because a personal poster has no titles of its own. |
| On — an auto-create template | Applied to titles nightly by its rules, and it appears in Automate Artwork. |
With auto-create on, Redraw its titles puts this template's titles at the front of the redraw queue and starts it. Saving already queues them, but behind everything else a template edit produces — which on a real library means hours. Use it when you want to look at what an edit did.
Applies to
Movie, Show, Collection — several can be on at once, and several templates can claim the same kind. It also decides which rules below are shown: seasons are TV-only, the collection banner is collection-only.
A template with no kind chosen is unscoped, not "none" — so every rule stays visible rather than hiding one you are about to need.
Which template wins — specificity, not a number
A title can be claimed by more than one template. Kustos settles it by how specifically each template asked for that title, trying three rungs in order and stopping at the first that matches:
- A template pinned to one of the title's Plex collections.
- A template scoped to one of its labels.
- The kind default — Movie, Show or Collection. This rung only considers templates pinned to nothing at all, so a pinned template never leaks onto the whole library.
A collection can be pinned to only one template. Pinning it to a second template moves it off the first one, without warning. For labels and the kind default, ties go to the older template: if two templates carry the same label, the one made first wins.
Why the oldest, which looks arbitrary and is not. The tiebreak's job is to be stable: it must give the same answer tomorrow as it does tonight. A template's age never changes, so a title cannot quietly change its look between two nightly runs because something else moved. Before there was a deterministic tiebreak the winner came down to physical row order in a table that is rebuilt every time a collection is built — so the template really could change on its own, with nobody touching anything.
There used to be a Priority number on each template. It was only ever the tiebreak inside one rung, never the thing that chose between rungs, and it has been removed. Use Exclude to settle a genuine clash — Krista, on why it can go: "you can use exclude now which we didn't have before to make a change if the wrong template hits something."
Exclude beats everything
Excludes are read before any rung is tried, and apply at all three. A template that excludes one of the title's labels or collections is removed from the running entirely, and resolution falls through to the next candidate as if that template had never matched.
Exclude wins even over a pin of the same collection on the same template.
That reads like a quirk and is a rule. The only way a template both pins X and excludes X is if you said both, and of the two statements "never use this for X" is the narrower one — so it is the one Kustos keeps. The alternative, pin beats exclude, has a worse failure: an exclude of a label would silently stop applying to any title that happened to also be pinned, which is precisely the leak the exclude was added to close.
One rule with no exceptions is one you can predict from the card without reading this page.
Applies to gates every rung, not just the kind default
The Movie / Show / Coll buttons say which kinds a template is for, and they are checked at the pin and label rungs too.
This was once not true, and it is worth knowing what it cost: a design meant only for collections was attached to a label, and every show wearing that Plex label resolved to it — 41 show and season posters drawn in the wrong look in a single night's run.
A template with no kind chosen is unscoped and still matches any kind through a pin or a label.
Personal posters are never resolved
Every rung requires auto-create to be on. A personal poster is never picked for a title by the nightly pass, even if it still carries a label or a pin.
Pinning it to collections or labels
Under Applies to are two lists:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| + Collection or label | Narrows the template to the titles in those collections, or carrying those labels. With nothing added, it applies to every title of the kinds above. |
| − Exclude collection or label | Removes titles from what it would otherwise match. These show as not <name> chips. |
So a template scoped to Movie with not Marvel Cinematic Universe dresses every film you have except that franchise — which is how you give one collection its own look without listing every other film.
Label scoping needs the label on the collection itself
A Plex label could only ever be put on a collection's titles, never on the collection object — so a template scoped to a label matched no collections at all. On one real library, four of seven label-scoped templates matched nothing and there was no way to tell.
A collection's settings now carry "Also label the collection itself". Turn it on for any label you intend to scope a template by, or the template will quietly apply to nothing.
Kustos now warns when a template's label scope matches nothing, so this fails loudly rather than silently.