📚 The Library on Trakt: What It Is and Where It’s Going

Trakt Questions & Help
1

Back in July, we renamed Collection to Library.

This was more than just a name change. It already reflects a clear direction for what the Library is meant to be.

Today, we want to explain what the Library represents, what’s changing, and why.

:clapper_board: What the Library Is Meant to Be

Going forward, the Library is intended to represent your Digital Media Library.

That means Movies and Episodes you have digital access to and can actually play in a Media Center.

A simple rule of thumb:

If you can press a Play button from Trakt to start watching something somewhere, it belongs in your Library.

:link: What’s Coming

Thanks to Trakt Plex Sync, we can already provide part of this experience. Enable Plex Sync, open Trakt, press play, stream on Plex.

The dream is to simply browse Trakt to find the best content to watch, then trigger playback on your preferred Media Center player.

:optical_disk: What About Physical Collections?

We know many of you used the Library to track physical media like Blu-rays and DVDs. That use case still matters, but it no longer fits the long-term direction of the Library.

:counterclockwise_arrows_button: February: Moving to List

In February, you’ll be able to transfer manually added Library items to a Custom List.

During the transfer:

  • Each Library item will be added to a Custom List
  • Existing tags will be preserved as Notes on those List items
  • You’ll be able to continue logging your Physical Library using that List

→ Nothing is lost, just moved to a better place.

:bullseye: Why We’re Doing This

By focusing on digital media, the Library:

  • becomes more useful and actionable
  • enables deeper integrations and future playback flows
  • avoids mixing different use cases in one place

At the same time, physical collections and personal organization continues to work great on Trakt thanks to Lists.

We’ll share more details as we get closer to February and make sure the transition is smooth.

:popcorn: The Trakt Team

3 Likes
🚀 Trakt Product Roundup – January 2026
📚 Update on Physical Library Handling
3

This is a discussion in response to this announcement: 📚 The Library on Trakt: What It Is and Where It’s Going

Personally, I do like the idea of being able to watch everything in your library directly from Trakt. But I’m curious: What led you to the decision to completely phase out the library for physical media? Why not just use a library with two tabs: one for digital media and one for physical media?

Yes, you can use lists. But many people will be disappointed with not being able to save their metadata in a standardized way, not being able to filter by their metadata, and just in general, not having a quickly accessible, dedicated space in the UI for that. Well, personally at least, I am.

A lot of people manage HUGE physical libraries with Trakt, and Trakt is THE place to do it. It keeps everything in one place and allows you to neatly organize your physical media with cross-references to what you own throughout the entire site.

During the name change, you even said yourself:

Whether you’re adding a Blu-ray sitting on your shelf or a digital movie in your Plex server, you’re not just marking it as “owned”. You’re cataloging what’s available to watch right now, in your personal Trakt viewing Library .

The new name reflects the true purpose of this feature: tracking both your owned physical media and the digital content available on your media centers.

This includes:

  • DVDs and Blu-rays on your shelf, along with the VHS tapes collecting dust in your garage.
  • Movies and shows in your Plex, Kodi, Jellyfin, or Emby server.
  • Digital purchases on various platforms.
  • Content you’ve ripped and organized

This new library fails to deliver on this promise badly.

Nothing is lost, just moved to a better place.

While yes, nothing is lost, a list without library features is certainly not a better place.

3 Likes
4

It’s very annoying, especially when Justin announced Renaming Collection: Your Personal Media Library Awaits when they renamed it to Library, there was emphasis that nothing will be changing and it’s intended purpose is still for digital and physical collections.

I’m not sure what changed between then and now but I don’t like having my physical library being demoted to a standard list where you can’t even filter the metadata like you can with Library.

Trakt keep taking more VIP features away from me, the very ones that keep me paying for it.

9 Likes
5

See OP? I told you so…

FWIW something that is rather strange, while they changed the name to Library and changed the URL, it is still viewable under the old url of Collection. In other words, I can access mine on:

https://trakt.tv/users/cajunrob/library
and
https://trakt.tv/users/cajunrob/collection

The latter btw is what’s currently used on several other sites that allow linking of lists from Trakt, e.g. mdblist.com to import lists from here. Something else that soon will be broken I am guessing.

My bigger question besides the limiting yet again of how paying customers use the website is one of privacy here.

So @kcador :

Precisely how is Trakt going to determine what I have access to in the way of digital files? I have digital movies and tv series that aren’t on my Plex server, or some of the streaming sites that syncing is possible from. So unless manual addition to the Library remains a thing, this will be an absolute dealbreaker.

2 Likes
6

They might try and use their streaming scrobbler and open it up to digital purchases too (not sure if that’s possible), which would then make the Library a VIP only feature.

It also makes me curious about their plans for other media servers, I know they’re going to use their Plex Sync but I don’t use Plex, I use Jellyfin. There’s also Emby and other media servers out there. Are they planning official support for them too or just leave us in the dark for other developers to make plugins for it?

3 Likes
7

The other issue is I have digital backups of Blu-Rays and DVD’s. I play those through Kodi because Plex can’t play from a folder like that. Sure I could remux or encode them but that defeats the purpose from my point of view of why I have a digital backup of them.

My question about privacy though was more geared to the fact that I have absolutely zero desire or trust in Trakt to be able to safeguard access to my digital items if they intend to have it mandatory to link accounts and the like.

Plus it doesn’t take into account that many of us watch on an actual real television screen. Something that clicking a link in an app isn’t designed to do. There’s no Trakt app for many of the smart tv’s nor is that something I really want. Trakt by name implication means “tracked”, it doesn’t mean “I am your intrusive media center hub and am tracking you and your watches and everything you own”.

And finally, the Plex Sync thread has been ignored for weeks. Numerous people report issues of it not syncing correctly. Many just gave up using it. If this Beta app becomes the sole method to determine what’s available to us that’s an utter joke.

ETA. Interesting to note though, right from the Library page:

Your show and movie library — All owned items including Blu-rays, DVDs, and digital downloads.

Yet we’re were all using it wrong? :rofl::roll_eyes:

6 Likes
8

Let it be known that I was planning to take Trakt up on their offer for old-timers to get another year of VIP at “only” 30 bucks, and see where things went into 2027.

Until I saw this announcement. Respectfully, I think the product folks have lost the plot. Your digital Library doesn’t need to replace the physical collection. The two could easily coexist, but the removal of proper support for physical media and metadata tells me we who maintain an actual library at home are no longer the target audience.

RIP my tenure, May 2015–January 2026 (actual expiration July). :pensive_face:

9 Likes
9

What a ridiculous change

5 Likes
10

An update from Github

The ultimate goal is definitely to support as many sources as we can.

We don’t have a materialized plan or target dates for specific providers (like Jellyfin or Emby) just yet, but as soon as we do, we’ll make it public.

The Vision: We view the new Library feature as a natural extension of Where to Watch. Just as “Where to Watch” covers streaming services, we want Library to cover your owned media.

I personally have content spread out everywhere (YouTube, Prime, Google TV, etc.), so I fully understand the need to unify that view to know exactly what you can watch. That is the problem we want to solve.

2 Likes
11

Yes, one or multiple, we’re not sure yet. Do you have a preference?

Yes, but more in the automatic and playable sense.

We’re thinking about this and maybe the transfer will be done in a list for movies and in another list for episodes. For the “tagged” items we may transfer them to a list and “untagged” items to another list. Let me know what’s your preference.

It will be optional to start with, yes. But at some point, we may migrate them automatically.

12

Please give an option in the new app to disable Library, so it doesn’t show up anywhere

I do not buy digital media, and gave up on using a media centre a few years ago

My current library is things i own on DVD, with this change I see no reason to keep this data

7 Likes
13

It is multi-faceted:

  • The data structure of the Library was designed at the time for a physical media library usage and highly movie-focussed,
  • There’s a lot of users using the Library for more than it’s intended purpose, they basically put everything they watch or have access to in it,
  • All of this while we are trying to make it more approachable for users that are usually “streamers” and heavy TV Show watchers.

→ All of this should answer the second part of your question

We are thinking/working on all these points. Tagging and filtering is exactly why we want to keep the notes alive and well during the transfer. Nothing set in stone yet but being able to filter any List with tags in notes (even new tags you would like to have later for your own organization) would be 10x better than to keep the Library with an additional dimension of tabs (physical vs digital) and the fixed tags.
Finding the list and adding to that list are more in the realm of “UX improvements” that I don’t see blocking at this point. That could even be solved with a plugin or third-party app that would give you only one button (called “Collect” or whatever) to add to that specific list with pre-registered tags that you would tick to add in a structured note. That is in the mean time, we’ll probably also take a stab at this at some point.

I love the idea, but also, this could just be a “view” that shows you all the media across some lists you select instead of the all-in-the-Library approach.

Yeah, that was true at the time, sorry.

See above, we have plan for tagging and filtering. Let me know if there’s something I forgot to cover.

📢 Updating Trakt Limits for 2026
15

See my answer to @CanePlayz above.
Thanks for your feedback!

17

Yeah, the API still has routes and documentation mentioning “collection”, this is just to not break every integration out there.

If you can press a Play button from Trakt to start watching something somewhere, it belongs in the future Library.
If it doesn’t, it can live in a list, you can even have a list for each service you have it on and notes for everything.

What is your fear in privacy exactly? You can have a private list if you want to keep something private.

18

Why the rush may I ask?

There’s future plans to support other services which is good but why not wait until you’ve done that? There seems to me a lot of changes being made that people dislike because they’re simply unfinished. This change to the Library seems to be just that, unfinished. It’ll only support Plex Sync until you start adding support for Google, Apple, Jellyfin, Emby etc.

It seems weird to push an unfinished feature onto people who see currently see it as a downgrade

5 Likes
19

We do not plan to link the same way as the Streaming Scrobbler. We are going to work either on syncing ourselves (think Plex Sync) or with third-party media centers that already sync with us.

Justin is currently not available to work on it but that thread is being monitored, if and when we can do something about an issue, we’ll do it.

Not all. And this was the purpose of this announcement, we’re not saying it’s now, it will be a process and we’re explaining where we came from and what it will be.

20

For the moment there is only this announcement. We want to prepare everyone (including ourselves) and get feedback on the way we are seeing the future of the Library because there were a lot of questions about Library and V3.

In February, we’ll have the tool to migrate your data. After that, we’ll be working to support as many services as possible to work with the new Library while working on the missing pieces (tagging, notes, filtering,…) to support your workflows, based on your feedback. There no ETA for the “push”.

21

What is considered “the push”?

From what I understand you’re saying here, from February, instead of using the Library for my physical collection, I will be forced to add them to a custom list. Because to me that is what I consider “the push”, that is when the changes directly impacts me by downgrading my library to a list without the ability to filter them by metadata.

I just want a simple clarification before I start looking elsewhere; starting February, will I still have the ability to manually add to my Library or not?

3 Likes
22

Hi everyone.

Maybe i misunderstood. On the new app (from my android device, i still use old trakt on my desktop pc) where’s the option to add an item to the library? I’m totally missing it.

Thanks, Ezra.

23

Kevin, I just don’t get it and I don’t get why.

A library is a library. If I go to my local council-run library, I can get digital and physical media. At home, I keep my physical media next to my digital media players. They coexist and that’s how it should be. Why force physical media into a separate list?

To me, it’s just another downgrade to functionality and how people happily use this website. Coupled with the fact that the Library isn’t on V3 at launch, it’s like a full VIP feature has almost been nuked - and after you’ve asked people to pay more money for said VIP features.

I cancelled my VIP in June and have been waiting for the much-mooted upgrades to justify the increase. All I see are downgrades - including this. How can you continue to justify less functionality for more money?

14 Likes