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How to Group Movies Together in the Apple TV App on a Mac

apple tv icon over smart playlist

Recently, I took advantage of the price cut and bought the Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan collections of James Bond movies, as well as “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” with George Lazenby’s one and only appearance as 007.

The individual movies all show up under the “Recently Added,” Last 3 Months,” and “Action & Adventure” listings (well, except for “OHMSS,” which, for some reason, appears under “Action” rather than “Action & Adventure.”) However, I wanted to collect all the Bond movies into a James Bond folder. You can’t actually create a folder, but you can create a playlist of a collection of movies. To do so:

Group Movies in Apple TV

  1. Open the TV app on your Mac.
  2. Navigate to the “Library” tab.
  3. Press and hold your mouse (or trackpad) and drag over the movies you wish to group. You can also Ctrl-click on individual titles.
    3 james bond movies in apple tv list
  4. Go to the File menu and select “New > Smart Playlist.”
  5. Name the new playlist (such as, in my case, “James Bond”).
    chosing smart playlist from file menu in apple tv app on mac
  6. The movies will be assembled in the playlist IF you’ve downloaded them. If you haven’t you be asked to download them before they can be added to the playlist.
  7. After you’ve created a playlist, you can drag and drop other films into it.

By the way, contrary to some critics’ opinions, Pierce Brosnan was actually a very good 007. It’s just that after “Goldeneye,” the other three films as the superspy were diverting trifles, but not classic Bond.

Dennis Sellers
the authorDennis Sellers
Contributing Author
Dennis has over 40 years of journalism experience and has written hundreds of articles. For the past 20-plus years, he's been an online journalist, covering mainly Apple Inc. He's written for MacCentral, MacWorld, MacMinute, Macsimum News, Apple Daily Report, and is now contributing editor at Apple World Today.
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4 Comments

  • How can I get back the correct posters for my movies instead of those awful modified rectangles Apple seems to insist on in the mis-named TV app?

  • I can make playlists in the TV app on my Mac, but they do not sync with the app on the iPad. Is there any way to do that? I’d love to find a way to organize the video files on the mobile device.
    Thx.

  • I have done this for ages with smart groups for letters/years/etc… but did you notice that while you may order them properly (by title say) on your Mac that the list will default to director order on Apple TV box connected to your TV? It has perplexed me the large number of bugs that still remain from the iTunes to TV app change… Also, if you look at it on your TV and you use longer titles like ‘James Bond (X): (movie title)’ that the TV app displayed on your actual TV will truncate the title… I find these kind of basic synchronization between app errors disheartening this far from the launch of the ‘iTunes’ replacement.

  • Right click on your selected files.
    Click on “Get Info”
    Enter “James Bond” in the Genre field.

    Then in list view your can sort by Genre (if you add the field to display).