[Feature] Group albums by name prefix

[hitzhangjie]

I have searched the existing feature requests, both open and closed, to make sure this is not a duplicate request.

• Yes

The feature

The albums page already has Group by year and Group by owner. On a personal instance those don't help much. Year just mixes unrelated albums together. Owner is a single group if you're the only user. The list stays long and unfocused.

I keep a lot of albums for different kinds of media, and I already name them with a category prefix:

• game-cod, game-deltaforce, game-tarkov
• travel-japan, travel-iceland
• aigc, aigc-videos

What I actually want is those sitting under game, travel, aigc. That's more useful than year/owner for anyone who maintains many small album types (game clips, trips, AI-generated stuff, etc.).

This is not nested albums, album folders, or album tags. Those are covered in #15285, #5078, #19823, #28613 and they need a new data model. I'm asking for a view-only grouping option on the existing albums page, derived from the name. No new album field, no hierarchy, no sharing changes.

Suggested implementation

Add a "Group by name" option next to Year / Owner / None.

• Split the album title on a delimiter (default -) and use the first segment as the group key (game-cod → game).
• If the name has no delimiter, use the whole name, so aigc and aigc-videos land in the same group.
• Empty prefix (-something) goes to Uncategorized, sorted last.
• When this option is selected, a small delimiter input in the albums toolbar (so people who use / or _ can change it). Persist it in the existing album-view-settings preference.

This can stay entirely on the web client. Grouping already lives in AlbumsList.svelte as AlbumGroupBy functions; collapse/expand, cover vs list, and group sort order already work on AlbumGroup. The new option would be another grouping function plus the delimiter field. No API or schema change.

Web is enough for a first version. Mobile album grouping is a separate gap (#9424).

I've been using a local patch that does exactly this. With a few dozen prefixed albums the page becomes readable; without it everything is mixed together.

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[bo0tzz]

This reads to me like just an ad-hoc frontend sort in order to get part of the way to album folders/nesting - ie, kinda papering over it instead of doing a feature the proper way, which we're not really keen on.

[hitzhangjie]

This reads to me like just an ad-hoc frontend sort in order to get part of the way to album folders/nesting - ie, kinda papering over it instead of doing a feature the proper way, which we're not really keen on.

Yes, hope you maintainers could support something, like Tags, Categories.

[bo0tzz]

• which makes this a duplicate of the existing thread(s) asking for nesting/folders.