Exclude label/entity/device etc from action

[Yardco]

Describe the feature

Home Assistant currently allows targeting actions by area, floor, label, device, or entity. While this is powerful, there is no native way to exclude specific labels, devices, or entities from such a target.

This feature request proposes adding an exclusion mechanism to actions, allowing users to target a broad scope such as an area or floor while explicitly excluding certain entities, devices, or labels from being affected.

In practice, this would enable actions like “turn off everything on this floor except these devices” without requiring complex templates or duplicated logic.

Use cases

When turning off all lights in a floor or area, certain lights or devices should remain on. I’m currently running in to an issue where I don’t want the Christmas lights to be turned off, but everything else should. An exclusion option would allow Christmas lights (which are already carrying a Christmas label) to be marked and automatically respected. Same could be said for for example aquariums and security lights.

Current workarounds

Manually selecting entities instead of using area or floor targets (which is annoying as I’m swapping devices in and out, requiring me to update automations), using template logic to filter entity lists and creating additional actions to turn affected entities back on after being turned off.

Anything else?

An exclusion mechanism could be implemented as an optional field on action targets, for example:
• Exclude entities
• Exclude devices
• Exclude labels

[Yardco]

This exclusion mechanism would imo also be highly relevant for the new intent triggers. Triggers that operate on higher-level targets such as areas and floors are meant to work with a broad scope, but without exclusions they become difficult to map safely and predictably. For example, setting a floor-level trigger for my HVAC system would not work as intended if my refrigerator and freezer are also part of that same floor and cannot be excluded.

[DutchDynamics]

I was running into s similar thing, but more filter way, I have a light in every room with a label 'Main Light', but I also have other lights, with different labels, or light without labels. I would be nice to be able to say, turn on all light on the first floor, with label main light. This also could work for the Intent Trigger, When a light in area 123 with label ABC is turned on then..... to this

[BBE-FR]

Same exclusion mechanism could be applied everywhere this new area / label picker is used:

• actions (as asked there)
• triggers (as asked in comment above)
• conditions

[nielsrowinbik]

This is something we're tracking on our roadmap currently: OpenHomeFoundation/roadmap#79. Have a look, there's a screencap of an early prototype in there that we'd love to get opinions on.

For clarity: for now we're really aiming to keep it simple, and so we will not be working on rule-based exclusions and similar features (as outlined in the roadmap item I linked).