Seeking help from some steam pros who hopefully have a suggestion to solve my problem!

I'm using steam on several computers. 4 at the moment, to be exact.
Now I recently got a few more games and the alphabetical order of them in my libary is just not clear enough for me anymore.
I want my games to be sorted differently and yay- there's a great way to do exactly what I want to! Set categories to your games.
So I sat down and sorted all my games into the categories I wanted them to be in and was happy.

One hour later, upon loggin into steam on another device all categories were gone again and all games back in one big alphabetical pile.
I googled for a way to solve this problem, but all I found was old forum postings saying you have to copy certain files from one computer to another after every change you make in your libary.

Now my question is: is there any way to set steam categories accountbound instead of devicebound?

I really want to use the category feature, but if I actually need to copy around one file to all other devices everytime I log into steam on a computer that's not my own computer /or if I have to override that one file on my own computer everyday so I have the categories at one device at least - I think I'd be digging through my data folders more than I'm actually playing the neatly organized games.

7 years ago

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is there any way to set steam categories accountbound instead of devicebound?

no, sorry

7 years ago
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7 years ago
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I think I only logged out on the other device when trying it yesterday, and didn't completely close the application. I'll try that and see if it does the trick!

7 years ago
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7 years ago
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Thanks fror the help, it worked! I guess it really was several steps of closing reopening and waiting for steam to sync everything :D

7 years ago
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i regularly use my steam account on 4 different computers, and closing steam after making category changes seems to be key.

7 years ago
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7 years ago
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+1

7 years ago
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Another vote here for closing the app before shutting down the PC. Steam seems to handle things differently if you actually exit the app first. I've noticed it also doesn't remember what screen/game I was last on if I just shutdown. But if I exit the app first, that info is saved.

7 years ago
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7 years ago
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should work like you desire it to, steam categories are saved at steamdir\userdata\youraccountid\7\remote\sharedconfig.vdf and should get synced across all your devices you login with the same account.

7 years ago
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I have the same problem, and have tried several combinations of keeping things open/closed/etc. but have never found a satisfactory solution. I want to re-organize my entire library, but I don't want to do it four times. If you ever find out something that definitely works, let me know, and I will do the same...

7 years ago
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you can try to check your cloud_log.txt in the log dir of your steam directory and search in the log for entries about the file "sharedconfig.vdf", maybe you can get some useful infos about the issue.

7 years ago*
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Cool, I'll take a look-- thanks. :)

7 years ago
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For me it worked by closing steam everywhere but on my main computer, organizing the libary and then waiting a few minutes before completely closing the application. Then I reopened to make sure it saved, and waited a bit before looking if it synced to the other devices. This time everything was still organized on the other devices, so it really seems to be completely closing everything + the waiting times inbetween.

7 years ago
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Thank you...I'll try that approach the next time I plan to make non-trivial changes.

7 years ago
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I've actually never had issues with it not immediately syncing, while running client simultaneously on two computers. Sounds like another one of Steam's infamously irregular bugs.

7 years ago
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It's probably a steam glitch or a problem on your side - categories that I use for my games are being synchronized across all my devices (and OSes).

7 years ago
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alphabetical pile
25 games

ok.

7 years ago
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