Collections

A collection is a group of related items on the Hub (models, datasets, Spaces, papers) that are organized together on the same page. Collections are useful for creating your own portfolio, bookmarking content in categories, or presenting a curated list of items you want to share. Check out this guide to understand in more detail what collections are and how they look on the Hub.

You can directly manage collections in the browser, but in this guide, we will focus on how to manage it programmatically.

Fetch a collection

Use get_collection() to fetch your collections or any public ones. You must have the collection’s slug to retrieve a collection. A slug is an identifier for a collection based on the title and a unique ID. You can find the slug in the URL of the collection page.

Let’s fetch the collection with, "TheBloke/recent-models-64f9a55bb3115b4f513ec026":

>>> from huggingface_hub import get_collection
>>> collection = get_collection("TheBloke/recent-models-64f9a55bb3115b4f513ec026")
>>> collection
Collection(
  slug='TheBloke/recent-models-64f9a55bb3115b4f513ec026',
  title='Recent models',
  owner='TheBloke',
  items=[...],
  last_updated=datetime.datetime(2023, 10, 2, 22, 56, 48, 632000, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc),
  position=1,
  private=False,
  theme='green',
  upvotes=90,
  description="Models I've recently quantized. Please note that currently this list has to be updated manually, and therefore is not guaranteed to be up-to-date."
)
>>> collection.items[0]
CollectionItem(
  item_object_id='651446103cd773a050bf64c2',
  item_id='TheBloke/U-Amethyst-20B-AWQ',
  item_type='model',
  position=88, 
  note=None
)

The Collection object returned by get_collection() contains:

high-level metadata: slug, owner, title, description, etc.
a list of CollectionItem objects; each item represents a model, a dataset, a Space, or a paper.

All collection items are guaranteed to have:

a unique item_object_id: this is the id of the collection item in the database
an item_id: this is the id on the Hub of the underlying item (model, dataset, Space, paper); it is not necessarily unique, and only the item_id/item_type pair is unique
an item_type: model, dataset, Space, paper
the position of the item in the collection, which can be updated to reorganize your collection (see update_collection_item() below)

A note can also be attached to the item. This is useful to add additional information about the item (a comment, a link to a blog post, etc.). The attribute still has a None value if an item doesn’t have a note.

In addition to these base attributes, returned items can have additional attributes depending on their type: author, private, lastModified, gated, title, likes, upvotes, etc. None of these attributes are guaranteed to be returned.

Create a new collection

Now that we know how to get a Collection, let’s create our own! Use create_collection() with a title and description. To create a collection on an organization page, pass namespace="my-cool-org" when creating the collection. Finally, you can also create private collections by passing private=True.

>>> from huggingface_hub import create_collection

>>> collection = create_collection(
...     title="ICCV 2023",
...     description="Portfolio of models, papers and demos I presented at ICCV 2023",
... )

It will return a Collection object with the high-level metadata (title, description, owner, etc.) and an empty list of items. You will now be able to refer to this collection using it’s slug.

>>> collection.slug
'owner/iccv-2023-15e23b46cb98efca45'
>>> collection.title
"ICCV 2023"
>>> collection.owner
"username"
>>> collection.url
'https://huggingface.co/collections/owner/iccv-2023-15e23b46cb98efca45'

Manage items in a collection

Now that we have a Collection, we want to add items to it and organize them.

Add items

Items have to be added one by one using add_collection_item(). You only need to know the collection_slug, item_id and item_type. Optionally, you can also add a note to the item (500 characters maximum).

>>> from huggingface_hub import create_collection, add_collection_item

>>> collection = create_collection(title="OS Week Highlights - Sept 18 - 24", namespace="osanseviero")
>>> collection.slug
"osanseviero/os-week-highlights-sept-18-24-650bfed7f795a59f491afb80"

>>> add_collection_item(collection.slug, item_id="coqui/xtts", item_type="space")
>>> add_collection_item(
...     collection.slug,
...     item_id="warp-ai/wuerstchen",
...     item_type="model",
...     note="Würstchen is a new fast and efficient high resolution text-to-image architecture and model"
... )
>>> add_collection_item(collection.slug, item_id="lmsys/lmsys-chat-1m", item_type="dataset")
>>> add_collection_item(collection.slug, item_id="warp-ai/wuerstchen", item_type="space") # same item_id, different item_type

If an item already exists in a collection (same item_id/item_type pair), an HTTP 409 error will be raised. You can choose to ignore this error by setting exists_ok=True.

Add a note to an existing item

You can modify an existing item to add or modify the note attached to it using update_collection_item(). Let’s reuse the example above:

>>> from huggingface_hub import get_collection, update_collection_item

# Fetch collection with newly added items
>>> collection_slug = "osanseviero/os-week-highlights-sept-18-24-650bfed7f795a59f491afb80"
>>> collection = get_collection(collection_slug)

# Add note the `lmsys-chat-1m` dataset
>>> update_collection_item(
...     collection_slug=collection_slug,
...     item_object_id=collection.items[2].item_object_id,
...     note="This dataset contains one million real-world conversations with 25 state-of-the-art LLMs.",
... )

Reorder items

Items in a collection are ordered. The order is determined by the position attribute of each item. By default, items are ordered by appending new items at the end of the collection. You can update the order using update_collection_item() the same way you would add a note.

Let’s reuse our example above:

>>> from huggingface_hub import get_collection, update_collection_item

# Fetch collection
>>> collection_slug = "osanseviero/os-week-highlights-sept-18-24-650bfed7f795a59f491afb80"
>>> collection = get_collection(collection_slug)

# Reorder to place the two `Wuerstchen` items together
>>> update_collection_item(
...     collection_slug=collection_slug,
...     item_object_id=collection.items[3].item_object_id,
...     position=2,
... )

Remove items

Finally, you can also remove an item using delete_collection_item().

>>> from huggingface_hub import get_collection, update_collection_item

# Fetch collection
>>> collection_slug = "osanseviero/os-week-highlights-sept-18-24-650bfed7f795a59f491afb80"
>>> collection = get_collection(collection_slug)

# Remove `coqui/xtts` Space from the list
>>> delete_collection_item(collection_slug=collection_slug, item_object_id=collection.items[0].item_object_id)

Delete collection

A collection can be deleted using delete_collection().

This is a non-revertible action. A deleted collection cannot be restored.

>>> from huggingface_hub import delete_collection
>>> collection = delete_collection("username/useless-collection-64f9a55bb3115b4f513ec026", missing_ok=True)

Hub Python Library