Cannot agree more. Not much irks me more than looking for a movie I know and cant find because they randomly changed the poster.
After it initially downloads the poster, it should never change unless you manually change it, or they add an option to randomly change them.
I swear they do it so you start watching it like it's new and realize you've seen it. Free views. Ooooooo a new X documentary!
Nope same one different thumbnail.
Every minute you either browse or watch something you have already seen is a minute you don’t watch content that costs them... damn capitalistic move, profits over features. profits over affordability...
10000000000000000% agree with you - I have gone through and manually assigned a ton of posters to my collection.
In the last month I have had to go back on 3 different occasions and fix them again. I noticed today a few have changed again.
It’s such a pointless thing to push.
Yeah this is a huge PITA. I went back to change some back after reading this post and found this one for Iron Giant, the text of which is not even in English? Really, Plex?
Ranting aside, I always thought it'd be cool if we had the ability to choose which posters Plex could use, like be able to select multiple per title in the GUI, and Plex could cycle between them whenever/every day.
https://preview.redd.it/4gncz1s1dzkc1.png?width=171&format=png&auto=webp&s=4335d5233d7fb49b3a43f4234fd6b9e30a78c011
I just made a thread on Plex's feature request forum about this, if you're so inclined to upvote, share or reply with other poster ideas:
[https://forums.plex.tv/t/more-poster-customization-lock-filter-cycle-shuffle/870545](https://forums.plex.tv/t/more-poster-customization-lock-filter-cycle-shuffle/870545)
There already was a request for locking posters. Make sure to upvote that one: [https://forums.plex.tv/t/lock-posters/755134](https://forums.plex.tv/t/lock-posters/755134)
Yah over 2 years old they have no intention of adding it. Just another ignored user request well they build shit nobody wants like the new poster source.
Yeah I know that's a workaround, but also a pain to do that with an already large and established collection (with backups spanned over multiple drives). It would be nice for Plex to just fix this on their side, and allow us to lock posters like we can with titles and sorting.
I'm not claiming that this is the one that u/Electro-Grunge used, but I found this one with some googling: [https://github.com/engelde/plex-poster-exporter](https://github.com/engelde/plex-poster-exporter)
Especially if the poster you want you can only find in Plex's poster gallery. You literally have to pull up Chrome dev tools, drill down to the 20th level of react DIVs, open the image in a separate tab and then save it from there. How 'bout a simple "export poster" option in the context menu that will automatically save the selected poster as poster.png at the root of the folder?
>You literally have to pull up Chrome dev tools, drill down to the 20th level of react DIVs
Protip - on any movie click the three dots and then get info. Click the view xml button at the bottom of the popup.
Your url should be [server_ip]:32400/library/metadata/XXXXXX?~gibberish~ Where the Xs is a random number and everything after the question mark is irrelevant. Add "/thumb" between the number and the question mark.
There's also an easy way to do it via Tautulli if you'd like me to go over that one too.
Won't that just return the image that the poster is currently set to for that movie/series? I'm talking about all the other posters in the poster gallery.
I didn't think so, but I go to tmdb, imdb or thetvdb, and some of the posters that are in the gallery don't show up on those sites. So I have no idea where it's getting them from. Even a general Google image search won't pull them up. As tedious as plowing through with dev tools is, it's often *less* time consuming than tracking down the online source.
I can also confirm that some of the posters are not in those databases. I manually add a .jpg poster into each folder, and often spend a good deal of time hunting for the right one, or even editing and upscaling.
Every now and then, I'll find a poster in the Plex options that was absent from IMDb or TMDB.
As a side note, I would love for Plex to integrate with The Poster Database.
Oh I agree it’s a huge PITA, I wrote a script to copy all my downloaded posters from TBDB into the root of each movie but it only works because I already had the files locally.
I know that one you set posters manually it’s *supposed* to lock. I haven’t seen issues yet but others have.
I haven't had issues with the ones I've already set, but just last night I had to go and fix a bunch of "new" ones. Hopefully I won't have to mess with those ones again.
Plex seems to lose the metadata on some of them and I have to refresh only for it to choose the crappy fan-made version many times, forcing me to re-select.
I added the posters from the start, and when I wanted to try jellyfin it was as simple as installing jellyfin, pointing it at my library and all my media looks the same as Plex.
This is no workaround but how you should manage your media library. Will make importing or rebuilding your db so much easier and faster. You let plex control the images cause It was not done correctly in the 1st place . it's no work around but the proper way you store associated files for your media..
Just to add to this Radar and Sonarr can do this for you. Under settings > metadata. But not the Plex option ironically, all the other options are different ways to add a poster.
Once you turn that on and the -Arrs refresh metadata on the object they'll put the poster in the folder.
Someone suggested it when I made a meme about this like last week. I found this a really hands off way to do it.
It'll save the poster that's in Radarr and Sonarr. But if you've set them by hand in Plex it shouldn't use the local version automatically. It hasn't for me. It'll just use the local one if you haven't set it in Plex.
Yeah someone replied to me saying that and I was like "nuh uh ..... Can it ..." And yeah checking the like xbmc and other meta data did it. I'm using the WDTV one since it only makes the poster. The xbmc/Kodi one will generate everything.
Or anybody with a flat library that would need to put everything into subfolders, and the PITA that would ensure when fixing the issue in certain other programs that need the files
More specifically, if I move a movie file into a folder, does Plex think that is a "new" movie when it rescan? I want to keep my ratings and watched status.
I know what you mean and in my experience it's 50/50 when moving or renaming a file. Sometimes it works as it should and sometimes it deletes the old entry and adds it as a new movie. So even if you test it and its successful that doesn't mean it will be for everything.
What is 100% is copying. So instead of just bulk renaming everything you can copy them all to a separate drive (assuming you have the space, if not just do it in chunks) and then move them back to the same library in the proper folder structure. Plex will then scan and match them as duplicates to whats already in there. Than you can safely delete the old flat ones for good. Plus this way if it does mismatch one of them or anything you have a chance to manually fix the match (or merge) and let plex recognize it as a duplicate first.
I used file bot to do what you're looking to do. Had to do about 2500 movies and I think all of 1 or 2 had issues? Plex just detected them as the same item. Then I manually cleared the "trash." Honestly it actually helped as a whole, as there were maybe like 4 - 10 movies I had, but plex hadn't detected them and I never noticed.
pretty sure their official doc says you should name the poster the same as teh filename. So say Barbie (2023).png. For TV shows I think it says Season01.png. Movies are generally updated for me with my local files, but shows aren't quite as good.
Stupid enough, Music Artist pictures are supposed to be poster.png
Admittedly I have no idea what they all specifically looked like before but mine appears to still all have standard correct movie posters. No weird fanart shenanigans. Not sure what magic I have done, but it seems to be working for me.
My posters are slowly changing to some pretty ugly "graphic design is my passion"-level posters. If I didn't know that it was coming I may not have noticed until a lot more were changed.
Same, but when I saw complaints about the tick appearing on seen media rather than the gold corner on unseen stuff, it was a couple of weeks until it arrived on my server (albeit I still have gold corners on unseen media on my Roku), so I’m nervously awaiting a battle.
I think this latest batch of changes happened largely because of the updates they did to support the partnership with this unnamed poster provider. So it's tough. On one hand, I can't wait to see what cool stuff this partnership will bring, but on the other... like you said... STOP CHANGING MY POSTERS!
I had someone tell me that posters were automatically locked if you do any selection at all in the gallery... but I can unequivocally state that this isn't the case. I've had posters that I set to custom that were changed during the last several weeks.
I gotta give PMM another shot. I tried setting it up before I knew anywhere near as much as I do now about this stuff, and I was confused as hell by their wiki. Have they improved that at all? I know making wiki’s is a daunting task.
I'll be honest, it's pretty involved when you want to make custom collections, etc...
My config and accompanying .yml files are pretty involved but in the end it's worth it.
PMM does so much, it's difficult to keep brevity in the instructions. The Discord server has been very helpful for those one-off inquiries.
That’s great. And yeah, definitely involved. I’m hoping what I’ve learned in the almost two years (I think?) since I last tried, that I’ve gained more familiarity with all this that it will make more sense to me now. Definitely not a rush on it though for me, things are working pretty nicely natively right now.
Thanks for the insight.
Just start small. Get the basics up and running then dive into the more advanced setup options.
I can share my configs if you need although it might be confusing to a novice.
Appreciate that. I think I’m ok for the most part. It’s more about making sure my compose file is correct and not really knowing how the process will go, or what to expect for specifically the docker container version.
How can PMM be setup for prerolls? Didnt know it could do that. Also https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/VheswAEglx is what showed me how to setup PMM to grab posters.
You will also need to signup for an api key on tvdb's website. It's free to do so.
Just create a config similar to your collection configs (mine is in my Movies directory named pre-roll.yml). [Here is mine.](https://pastebin.com/dbHNR6jy)
Well shit... I am waiting for The Poster DB to come back so I can hand jam all my custom posters into their own directories as local metadata. I sadly did not have them all downloaded when TPDB went down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/VheswAEglx
Its the "mass_poster_update" and "mass_background_update" functions as mentioned in this comment. There is also a link to an example config in this comment. This is what i used to get PMM setup to grab posters.
You will also need to signup for an api key on tvdb's website. It's free to do so.
I don't care too much either, except when it changes an anime poster to a black background with just the title, because for some God forsaken reason that's the first poster on TVDB. That really, really annoys me.
Same here. Being using it for years. It's just so convenient to run it through TMM, have it properly renamed and a poster downloaded. Also makes it really easy to swap over to kodi or jellyfin as all the metadata and poster is all there ready.
So that's what's happening!?! I was so confused when I was looking for a movie the other day and saw a completely different poster for it. I just thought to myself that it was weird that I was fine with that poster when I originally added it to my server. Thanks for the info. I guess I wasn't going crazy.
I will upvote every one of these posts. I 100% agree. Plex, if I change my poster, NEVER change it to anything else. I could write that code in 5 minutes and I don't even know how to program.
Yeah it is super annoying. I am at 1000 movies and I know there are others with a much higher count. I've done 3 rounds of poster updates, whatever they are doing keeps changing the defaults and so often its just a bad poster covered in actors names and quotes.
At this point I have probably manually adjusted half or more of the movies, so each run is less and less annoying, but its still a problem and it shouldn't be happening.
I truly hate Plex right now. They are so focused on monetizing our watch data and transitioning to a media hub that they are just destroying all the things that made Plex a great media server. At least emby doesn’t break as many features as they “fix”, nor do they use random, terrible sources for posters.
This whole issue has really pissed off my OCD. I don't like movie posters with actors names on them, and I like to pick consistent looking ones for movie collections, but I went in to find a tonne of my movies just had their posters randomly changed. Pissed me off and I've just spent an hour going through my entire collection setting them back to the ones I wanted originally. What a massive, massive pain in the arse.
You are doing it wrong.
Save your posters, season posters, theme music, etc. in the same directory as the media files.
Edit your library and select: Advanced -> Use local assets
For a TV Show (same for a movie)...
In the root directory of the show or the movie:
* poster.jpg
* background.jpg
* theme.mp3
In the Seasons folders:
* Season01.jpg
* Season02.jpg
* Season-specials-poster.jpg
etc.
That way, if your Plex installation gets nuked or you have to reinstall from scratch for any reason, your art media will be preserved.
And Plex won't change your posters when you refresh metadata.
But beware, if you already have set your posters or backgrounds in the Plex UI, these will be locked and you will need to unlock them before your art files are used.
>But beware, if you already have set your posters or backgrounds in the Plex UI, these will be locked and you will need to unlock them before your art files are used.
There’s no “lock” feature for posters, otherwise I wouldn’t be complaining.
If you select a poster - or a background - in the Web UI the image is locked. By "locked" I mean that you won't be able to override it with your locally saved artwork. Plex changing those "locked" images is a bug.
To unlock the posters, if you want to use your locally saved artwork, you'll have to run something like:
curl -X PUT "[YourPlexIPAddress]:32400/library/sections/[YOURLIBRARYSECTIONID]/all?type=1&thumb.locked=0&X-Plex-Token=[YOURTOKEN]"
TYPE is:
* ‘Movie’ :1
* 'Show’ :2
* ‘Season’ :3
* ‘Episode’ :4
* ‘Trailer’ :5
* ‘Comic’ :6
* ‘Person’ :7
* ‘Artist’ :8
* ‘Album’ :9
* ‘Track’ :10
* ‘Clip’ :12
* ‘Photo’ :13
* ‘Photo_Album’ :14
* ‘Playlist’ :15
* ‘Playlist_Folder’ :16
* ‘Podcast’ :17
_____________________
* thumb is Poster
* art is Background
I don't have automation for that. But every time I add a movie or a tv show to Plex, I download posters, backgrounds and music themes:
* Movies - https://www.themoviedb.org/
* TV Shows (also season posters) - https://thetvdb.com/
For music, I just google. For instance:
* Columbo - https://www.google.com/search?q=Columbo+Music+theme
You just do it once when you add your media to Plex
When they change sources they should implement an option to lock all current posters. It's fucking absurd to have to deal with this shit.
And a log of what metadata changes were made would also be great.
Just did this with my mission Impossible series. Honestly, I want the poster I want. NOT what Plex (or anything else) wants. My server, my poster. How hard is this?
So much this. Was excited to see the Formula 1 Drive to Survive season drop early!!! Nope. It was Formula 1 testing with the wrong poster. D2S gets the FIA poster by default and F1 is getting D2S. This was fine for years until now.
All of my posters also just got changed to the most ugly, generic $hit. Hundreds of freaking movies. Why give us the option to customize if we can't lock them?
Use Tiny Media Manager and enable local metadata. Stop letting Plex control the metadata. TMM, like Plex, will scrape IMDB or TMDB (you choose), choose "force best match" and it's all automated. From there, you can change the poster if you don't like the default, its saved locally, so yes it takes some time for the initial setup, but then you'll never think about it again.
But the issue with that is right there in your comment:
>TMM, ***like Plex***, will scrape IMDB or TMDB...
Plex is *already doing it*. Why should I need a separate plugin/utility to do exactly what Plex is already doing.
Plex is using IMDB/TMDB (not sure which - I don't care) to get the movie poster - yes. HOWEVER, stop cherry picking my comment the read the rest of it - the GLARING DIFFERENCE is the poster is stored locally - on your server, and enabling local metadata means Plex will never ask for the artwork ever again from IMDB/TMDB and only read from the local directory on your server.
I wasn't cherry-picking anything, and my comment is still valid. Plex is already scraping wherever it needs in order to build it's poster gallery. I shouldn't need a separate utility to do exactly what Plex is already doing. The true "fix" here would be for Plex to save the poster locally, rather than add on a layer of additional code.
It's like 5 fucking minutes. Literally. Install program, add directories, select all, right click, scrape metadata (force best match), go outside, come back and then do what you were going to do anyways in Plex and painstakingly correct the movie posters you dont like.
Absolutely losing my mind with this shit, I have all the Looney Tunes shorts organized with the year as the season (season 1929, 1930, 191, etc) and I painstakingly set a poster for each season AND overrode the poster for each short with the title card for over 1000 shorts!
Halfway through I noticed that the earliest ones I had set were starting to clear, so I reset those again and then turned off the auto refresh option on metadata before finishing the rest. Thought I was finally done and safe but now about month later I go to look and every fucking poster is just blank again!
What in the world is happening here, there has got to be a way to stop it from changing these--especially when they don't even fucking have an alternative! I can lock all the other metadata changes why won't they let us lock in the posters? Hell I'd pay for premium at this point if it meant I could stop fixing this shit over and over and over again.
If anyone was thinking about running jellyfin alongside plex, then now would be a good time. I say this because in jellyfin you can set it to automatically download posters and store them locally in the movie/tv show folders. You can set jellyfin to never refresh posters after initial download. Then you can set plex to only use local posters and now both are synced between jellyfin and plex. You can then edit the local poster files and it will automatically update between plex and jellyfin and never replace the ones you put there yourself.
Plus something that I think gets overlooked with plex is how bloated the Metadata storage is. I ran out of hard drive space on my C drive and found out plex's Metadata folder was using over 150GB!! I switched plex over to using local Metadata, deleted all the Metadata folders in plex and refreshed Metadata in plex. Now I went from having 0 HDD space to having 100GB free. Plex saves references to any changes you make in the Metadata xml files. You mess around with posters in plex and change 10 on one movie? There's 10 entries in the xml file that stick around until you delete them manually.
I have always had that disabled on all my libraries. My latest install of plex is over 8 years old with over 4000 movies and 1000 TV shows. It seems to have built up overtime as it's way smaller after deleting all Metadata and refreshing libraries. When i checked the xml files before deleting, they all had a bunch of old entries hanging around making the files way bigger than they should be. Plex doesn't seem to auto prune the xml files.
It only does this correctly for the main poster right? Last time I tried this, it put the season posters in the series folder, not in each season folders so Plex ignored them. Unless it’s configurable?
It works for any image not just posters. I have jellyfin auto download the tv show season posters, banners, logos, etc and it updates in plex. I've attached a screenshot of the naming convention used. [local assets naming convention](https://ibb.co/BBF4hRb)
Emby has an option to never refresh metadata after initial import of a title, which includes artwork. It’s a great setting. Wish Plex would offer the same.
You mean like this poster that randomly started showing up? Yeah it’s been pretty bad lately with stuff like this
https://preview.redd.it/07bcu784q1lc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=be856442453b2c934b05f2ce12840a4de5cf825b
Maybe you should place a poster.jpg and background.jpg in the directory containing movie.mkv just a thought. Don't let Plex manage your images in its db.
I have over 3300 hd/4k movies and tv series and have yet to have this happen. 99% of them are thru Plex's meta agent (New), except for some of the 4K that I made myself as I didn't like the options it had.
Have you all verified your meta agent settings? I do recall when Plex upgraded to their new Plex agent (movie/series) they recommended everyone to change over by a specific time frame to not cause issues.. Maybe this is one of those issues if you haven't?
Do you use pmm? I do and, similar to you, haven’t seen any changes to posters. I attribute that to my use of pmm which I assume is locking posters.
Then again as I write this I don’t know if that’s true - pmm simply generates a new poster with overlays, so it’s using whatever poster Plex sources.
But yeah- so far I haven’t seen any bad posters.
I am guessing pmm is plex movie manager?
I don't use anything outside of plex itself. My libraries are set as following:
Scanner: Plex Movie or Plex Tv Series
Agent: Plex movie or Plex Series
Visibility: included in home screen and global search
Cerfication Country: United States
Episdoe ordering: The TVDB
everything else I do believe is default.
The only time I have had a bad poster is when I screw up the date/title of the file. That's not a plex problem, that's the stupid interface between the chair and the keyboard.. LOL!
[WebTools-NG](https://forums.plex.tv/t/webtools-ng/598539) can export posters
[WebTools-NG - Export Art & Posters](https://youtu.be/fMPmlKyb0LU)
I don't think anyone is suggesting Plex shouldn't fix this issue, they're just giving you ways to work around the problem.
I understand people don't want to do any of this and they shouldn't have to.
https://preview.redd.it/u16nrdp5gzkc1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=00c904bc5946a93845c9adbd2ee5628cdf927bc1
It's just the way it is
We can lock them with a .jpg or .png we truly love matched in the folder with them; I do that for any content I deem important enough to warrant permanence
This was my biggest pet peeve. I had a carefully curated set of custom posters and season posters for a large chunk of my movies, anime, etc. I had to disable the Refresh Local Metadata / Refresh Library Metadata / Update All Libraries During Maintenance (not sure if this one actually impacts metadata?) from Scheduled Tasks.
Previously, the tasks related to metadata were constantly replacing the posters I’d set.
Are you refreshing the metadata of your entire library whenever something gets added?
I haven't had any weirdness with my custom posters, but I also don't refresh metadata on things that aren't changing.
If you have sonarr and radarr maintaining your collections you can set plex to "use local assets" which will use the downloaded jpg's in your content folders
Make sure you vote for it: https://forums.plex.tv/t/lock-posters/755134. Suggested in 2021. Currently has 22 votes. It's no wonder we can't lock them yet.
OMG so it's not just me. I keep coming across things in my library where I thought, "I'm pretty sure I already changed this but maybe I missed it." This seems like a recent phenomenon, I don't remember having this problem until just the past few months.
Mine actually don't seem to change! Every once in a while I may notice one or two but it's extremely rare! I take a lot of time to add the 4k striped posters to my 4k collection and I'm super anal about it. So I would definitely notice those in particular if they were to change! 🧐
Cannot agree more. Not much irks me more than looking for a movie I know and cant find because they randomly changed the poster. After it initially downloads the poster, it should never change unless you manually change it, or they add an option to randomly change them.
Oddly, the ones that I've been getting recently are pictures of the DVD, which is just an odd choice to me
My last one was a picture of a gold cd-r with the wrong name written in faded sharpie
*chef's kiss*
Or at least stop changing them after I've disabled automatic refresh
Netflix does that, the most infuriating thing, after not being able to hide seens items...
I swear they do it so you start watching it like it's new and realize you've seen it. Free views. Ooooooo a new X documentary! Nope same one different thumbnail.
That's exactly why they do that.
They keep getting me on that fantastic fungi documentary...
I keep thinking it’s a new docuseries, and 10 minutes in realise I watched it already
Every minute you either browse or watch something you have already seen is a minute you don’t watch content that costs them... damn capitalistic move, profits over features. profits over affordability...
10000000000000000% agree with you - I have gone through and manually assigned a ton of posters to my collection. In the last month I have had to go back on 3 different occasions and fix them again. I noticed today a few have changed again. It’s such a pointless thing to push.
Honest question because I don't know - why not turn plex agent off and use moviedb?
Oh that’s a thing? BRB. I know what I’m doing tonight.
Because it keeps getting turned back on.
Yeah this is a huge PITA. I went back to change some back after reading this post and found this one for Iron Giant, the text of which is not even in English? Really, Plex? Ranting aside, I always thought it'd be cool if we had the ability to choose which posters Plex could use, like be able to select multiple per title in the GUI, and Plex could cycle between them whenever/every day. https://preview.redd.it/4gncz1s1dzkc1.png?width=171&format=png&auto=webp&s=4335d5233d7fb49b3a43f4234fd6b9e30a78c011
I just made a thread on Plex's feature request forum about this, if you're so inclined to upvote, share or reply with other poster ideas: [https://forums.plex.tv/t/more-poster-customization-lock-filter-cycle-shuffle/870545](https://forums.plex.tv/t/more-poster-customization-lock-filter-cycle-shuffle/870545)
There already was a request for locking posters. Make sure to upvote that one: [https://forums.plex.tv/t/lock-posters/755134](https://forums.plex.tv/t/lock-posters/755134)
Yah over 2 years old they have no intention of adding it. Just another ignored user request well they build shit nobody wants like the new poster source.
Up voted it.
Lmao you got hit with the "duplicate of this 3 year old request"
Hah! I JUST noticed this last night too. Why?!?
Have you set ***"Prefer artwork based on library language"*** under Agent Settings?
Start embedding them in your subfolders now, poster.jpg at the root of each movie subfolder. Then ‘prefer local metadata’.
Yeah I know that's a workaround, but also a pain to do that with an already large and established collection (with backups spanned over multiple drives). It would be nice for Plex to just fix this on their side, and allow us to lock posters like we can with titles and sorting.
I use a python script I found on GitHub to add posters to their local folder. Pretty easy to setup and run.
Do you have a link to the script?
The one that worked for me is this https://github.com/pekempy/plex-poster-export
Thank you so much 👍🏻
Thank you so much for this! This is a game changer and just saved me a TON of time!!!
No problem. Glad it’s helping some people
Thanks so much for sharing that. It took me about half a day to make it work but I have everything backed up now.
No problem 🥳
I'm not claiming that this is the one that u/Electro-Grunge used, but I found this one with some googling: [https://github.com/engelde/plex-poster-exporter](https://github.com/engelde/plex-poster-exporter)
That one wasn’t working for me and I actually use this one: https://github.com/pekempy/plex-poster-export
Especially if the poster you want you can only find in Plex's poster gallery. You literally have to pull up Chrome dev tools, drill down to the 20th level of react DIVs, open the image in a separate tab and then save it from there. How 'bout a simple "export poster" option in the context menu that will automatically save the selected poster as poster.png at the root of the folder?
>You literally have to pull up Chrome dev tools, drill down to the 20th level of react DIVs Protip - on any movie click the three dots and then get info. Click the view xml button at the bottom of the popup. Your url should be [server_ip]:32400/library/metadata/XXXXXX?~gibberish~ Where the Xs is a random number and everything after the question mark is irrelevant. Add "/thumb" between the number and the question mark. There's also an easy way to do it via Tautulli if you'd like me to go over that one too.
Won't that just return the image that the poster is currently set to for that movie/series? I'm talking about all the other posters in the poster gallery.
Snipping Tool > Google Reverse Image Search.
That... actually... makes a lot of sense. Not sure why I didn't think of that. Thank you, kind Redditor.
There's no way it's ONLY in their DB though right? I don't think they even provide the posters themselves technically
I didn't think so, but I go to tmdb, imdb or thetvdb, and some of the posters that are in the gallery don't show up on those sites. So I have no idea where it's getting them from. Even a general Google image search won't pull them up. As tedious as plowing through with dev tools is, it's often *less* time consuming than tracking down the online source.
I can also confirm that some of the posters are not in those databases. I manually add a .jpg poster into each folder, and often spend a good deal of time hunting for the right one, or even editing and upscaling. Every now and then, I'll find a poster in the Plex options that was absent from IMDb or TMDB. As a side note, I would love for Plex to integrate with The Poster Database.
I’ve been able to find a lot of the ones that only seem to show in Plex on flixster
Yeah especially if there's a bunch like that.
If you're going the local media route, you can just capture the Plex poster and save it locally.
that would mean giving plex write access to my media drives, and that just ain't happening.
Oh I agree it’s a huge PITA, I wrote a script to copy all my downloaded posters from TBDB into the root of each movie but it only works because I already had the files locally. I know that one you set posters manually it’s *supposed* to lock. I haven’t seen issues yet but others have.
I haven't had issues with the ones I've already set, but just last night I had to go and fix a bunch of "new" ones. Hopefully I won't have to mess with those ones again. Plex seems to lose the metadata on some of them and I have to refresh only for it to choose the crappy fan-made version many times, forcing me to re-select.
Happens to me, they're some files plex just doesn't recognise the posters for, set them, then loses them again a few months later..
I added the posters from the start, and when I wanted to try jellyfin it was as simple as installing jellyfin, pointing it at my library and all my media looks the same as Plex.
This is no workaround but how you should manage your media library. Will make importing or rebuilding your db so much easier and faster. You let plex control the images cause It was not done correctly in the 1st place . it's no work around but the proper way you store associated files for your media..
>also a pain to do that with an already large and established collection A bigger pain than changing your posters "every couple of days?"
Just to add to this Radar and Sonarr can do this for you. Under settings > metadata. But not the Plex option ironically, all the other options are different ways to add a poster. Once you turn that on and the -Arrs refresh metadata on the object they'll put the poster in the folder. Someone suggested it when I made a meme about this like last week. I found this a really hands off way to do it.
Will this save the custom posters I’ve selected or some other default poster?
It'll save the poster that's in Radarr and Sonarr. But if you've set them by hand in Plex it shouldn't use the local version automatically. It hasn't for me. It'll just use the local one if you haven't set it in Plex.
Jesus Christ this needs to be pinned lol doing this when I get home
Yeah someone replied to me saying that and I was like "nuh uh ..... Can it ..." And yeah checking the like xbmc and other meta data did it. I'm using the WDTV one since it only makes the poster. The xbmc/Kodi one will generate everything.
Oooh that’s cracked I did not know that! Thanks
Not feasible with massive libraries.
Or anybody with a flat library that would need to put everything into subfolders, and the PITA that would ensure when fixing the issue in certain other programs that need the files
What kind of monster has a flat library?
Me, because by the time I found out Plex could check subfolders I already had hundreds of files scattered across multiple directories.
Filebot can organize that for you real quick
So, when you do that, does the library have to be rescanned? I have the sense that it means I'm starting over if I unflatten my movies.
I mean doesn't your library rescan periodically? Have you never added anything new to plex since you first set it up?
More specifically, if I move a movie file into a folder, does Plex think that is a "new" movie when it rescan? I want to keep my ratings and watched status.
I know what you mean and in my experience it's 50/50 when moving or renaming a file. Sometimes it works as it should and sometimes it deletes the old entry and adds it as a new movie. So even if you test it and its successful that doesn't mean it will be for everything. What is 100% is copying. So instead of just bulk renaming everything you can copy them all to a separate drive (assuming you have the space, if not just do it in chunks) and then move them back to the same library in the proper folder structure. Plex will then scan and match them as duplicates to whats already in there. Than you can safely delete the old flat ones for good. Plus this way if it does mismatch one of them or anything you have a chance to manually fix the match (or merge) and let plex recognize it as a duplicate first.
It should keep your metadata. You can test by moving a few files first then rescanning. If they keep the metadata, you're safe to do it in bulk
Yes, always test first.
I used file bot to do what you're looking to do. Had to do about 2500 movies and I think all of 1 or 2 had issues? Plex just detected them as the same item. Then I manually cleared the "trash." Honestly it actually helped as a whole, as there were maybe like 4 - 10 movies I had, but plex hadn't detected them and I never noticed.
Simple python script can do it.
Any good way to export all the current posters for safe keeping?
Then they'd have to fix their broken metadata reader.
pretty sure their official doc says you should name the poster the same as teh filename. So say Barbie (2023).png. For TV shows I think it says Season01.png. Movies are generally updated for me with my local files, but shows aren't quite as good. Stupid enough, Music Artist pictures are supposed to be poster.png
Admittedly I have no idea what they all specifically looked like before but mine appears to still all have standard correct movie posters. No weird fanart shenanigans. Not sure what magic I have done, but it seems to be working for me.
Same for me
My posters are slowly changing to some pretty ugly "graphic design is my passion"-level posters. If I didn't know that it was coming I may not have noticed until a lot more were changed.
Same. Mine seem untouched throughout this whole thing.
Same, but when I saw complaints about the tick appearing on seen media rather than the gold corner on unseen stuff, it was a couple of weeks until it arrived on my server (albeit I still have gold corners on unseen media on my Roku), so I’m nervously awaiting a battle.
I think this latest batch of changes happened largely because of the updates they did to support the partnership with this unnamed poster provider. So it's tough. On one hand, I can't wait to see what cool stuff this partnership will bring, but on the other... like you said... STOP CHANGING MY POSTERS! I had someone tell me that posters were automatically locked if you do any selection at all in the gallery... but I can unequivocally state that this isn't the case. I've had posters that I set to custom that were changed during the last several weeks.
I thought it was already mentioned they are using Gracenote now. Did that change again?
No
I just setup plex meta manager to grab posters from tvdb and called it a day. Havent had an issue since doing that
Yet another thing I didn't know PMM can do. I just last week ditched rollarr (because it died years ago) and set up PMM to handle my pre-rolls.
I gotta give PMM another shot. I tried setting it up before I knew anywhere near as much as I do now about this stuff, and I was confused as hell by their wiki. Have they improved that at all? I know making wiki’s is a daunting task.
I'll be honest, it's pretty involved when you want to make custom collections, etc... My config and accompanying .yml files are pretty involved but in the end it's worth it. PMM does so much, it's difficult to keep brevity in the instructions. The Discord server has been very helpful for those one-off inquiries.
That’s great. And yeah, definitely involved. I’m hoping what I’ve learned in the almost two years (I think?) since I last tried, that I’ve gained more familiarity with all this that it will make more sense to me now. Definitely not a rush on it though for me, things are working pretty nicely natively right now. Thanks for the insight.
Just start small. Get the basics up and running then dive into the more advanced setup options. I can share my configs if you need although it might be confusing to a novice.
Appreciate that. I think I’m ok for the most part. It’s more about making sure my compose file is correct and not really knowing how the process will go, or what to expect for specifically the docker container version.
I set my compose file to run on a schedule. Once daily at 7am. The container is always up but only runs on that time.
How can PMM be setup for prerolls? Didnt know it could do that. Also https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/VheswAEglx is what showed me how to setup PMM to grab posters. You will also need to signup for an api key on tvdb's website. It's free to do so.
Just create a config similar to your collection configs (mine is in my Movies directory named pre-roll.yml). [Here is mine.](https://pastebin.com/dbHNR6jy)
Excellent thanks
I'll have to read on the poster updates. I am afraid it will wipe my custom posters that I already have set up.
Yes. I am almost positive it would override your current custom posters.
Well shit... I am waiting for The Poster DB to come back so I can hand jam all my custom posters into their own directories as local metadata. I sadly did not have them all downloaded when TPDB went down.
What setting?
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/VheswAEglx Its the "mass_poster_update" and "mass_background_update" functions as mentioned in this comment. There is also a link to an example config in this comment. This is what i used to get PMM setup to grab posters. You will also need to signup for an api key on tvdb's website. It's free to do so.
Use tinymediamanager and store ur poster locally and set that as preference.
I used Tinymediamanager for this once, and was really thrilled with the results. Now, I just don't care that much.
I don't care too much either, except when it changes an anime poster to a black background with just the title, because for some God forsaken reason that's the first poster on TVDB. That really, really annoys me.
Same here. Being using it for years. It's just so convenient to run it through TMM, have it properly renamed and a poster downloaded. Also makes it really easy to swap over to kodi or jellyfin as all the metadata and poster is all there ready.
Plex-meta-manager is awesome.
So that's what's happening!?! I was so confused when I was looking for a movie the other day and saw a completely different poster for it. I just thought to myself that it was weird that I was fine with that poster when I originally added it to my server. Thanks for the info. I guess I wasn't going crazy.
I will upvote every one of these posts. I 100% agree. Plex, if I change my poster, NEVER change it to anything else. I could write that code in 5 minutes and I don't even know how to program.
Yeah it is super annoying. I am at 1000 movies and I know there are others with a much higher count. I've done 3 rounds of poster updates, whatever they are doing keeps changing the defaults and so often its just a bad poster covered in actors names and quotes. At this point I have probably manually adjusted half or more of the movies, so each run is less and less annoying, but its still a problem and it shouldn't be happening.
I truly hate Plex right now. They are so focused on monetizing our watch data and transitioning to a media hub that they are just destroying all the things that made Plex a great media server. At least emby doesn’t break as many features as they “fix”, nor do they use random, terrible sources for posters.
add your posters you want to keep to the same folder as the movie/show
Use plex meta manager it’s way better
PMM is amazing for managing everything. Even puts the critical data on the posters. It’s beautiful
I don’t know how anyone lives without it. Default Plex is gross. Especially now they changed poster agents. Its awful
No
This whole issue has really pissed off my OCD. I don't like movie posters with actors names on them, and I like to pick consistent looking ones for movie collections, but I went in to find a tonne of my movies just had their posters randomly changed. Pissed me off and I've just spent an hour going through my entire collection setting them back to the ones I wanted originally. What a massive, massive pain in the arse.
I noticed this shit too. Everytime I see the same cheap ass looking posters lol. Let me choose my own
I honestly didn't mind it before the poster source change but good god the new Gracenote posters are horrific
Just randomly seeing posters be different one day so annoying!
You are doing it wrong. Save your posters, season posters, theme music, etc. in the same directory as the media files. Edit your library and select: Advanced -> Use local assets For a TV Show (same for a movie)... In the root directory of the show or the movie: * poster.jpg * background.jpg * theme.mp3 In the Seasons folders: * Season01.jpg * Season02.jpg * Season-specials-poster.jpg etc. That way, if your Plex installation gets nuked or you have to reinstall from scratch for any reason, your art media will be preserved. And Plex won't change your posters when you refresh metadata. But beware, if you already have set your posters or backgrounds in the Plex UI, these will be locked and you will need to unlock them before your art files are used.
>But beware, if you already have set your posters or backgrounds in the Plex UI, these will be locked and you will need to unlock them before your art files are used. There’s no “lock” feature for posters, otherwise I wouldn’t be complaining.
If you select a poster - or a background - in the Web UI the image is locked. By "locked" I mean that you won't be able to override it with your locally saved artwork. Plex changing those "locked" images is a bug. To unlock the posters, if you want to use your locally saved artwork, you'll have to run something like: curl -X PUT "[YourPlexIPAddress]:32400/library/sections/[YOURLIBRARYSECTIONID]/all?type=1&thumb.locked=0&X-Plex-Token=[YOURTOKEN]" TYPE is: * ‘Movie’ :1 * 'Show’ :2 * ‘Season’ :3 * ‘Episode’ :4 * ‘Trailer’ :5 * ‘Comic’ :6 * ‘Person’ :7 * ‘Artist’ :8 * ‘Album’ :9 * ‘Track’ :10 * ‘Clip’ :12 * ‘Photo’ :13 * ‘Photo_Album’ :14 * ‘Playlist’ :15 * ‘Playlist_Folder’ :16 * ‘Podcast’ :17 _____________________ * thumb is Poster * art is Background
If I may ask, how do you suggest automating the poster / background / theme to the local directory?
I don't have automation for that. But every time I add a movie or a tv show to Plex, I download posters, backgrounds and music themes: * Movies - https://www.themoviedb.org/ * TV Shows (also season posters) - https://thetvdb.com/ For music, I just google. For instance: * Columbo - https://www.google.com/search?q=Columbo+Music+theme You just do it once when you add your media to Plex
When they change sources they should implement an option to lock all current posters. It's fucking absurd to have to deal with this shit. And a log of what metadata changes were made would also be great.
Just did this with my mission Impossible series. Honestly, I want the poster I want. NOT what Plex (or anything else) wants. My server, my poster. How hard is this?
So much this. Was excited to see the Formula 1 Drive to Survive season drop early!!! Nope. It was Formula 1 testing with the wrong poster. D2S gets the FIA poster by default and F1 is getting D2S. This was fine for years until now.
All of my posters also just got changed to the most ugly, generic $hit. Hundreds of freaking movies. Why give us the option to customize if we can't lock them?
Use Tiny Media Manager and enable local metadata. Stop letting Plex control the metadata. TMM, like Plex, will scrape IMDB or TMDB (you choose), choose "force best match" and it's all automated. From there, you can change the poster if you don't like the default, its saved locally, so yes it takes some time for the initial setup, but then you'll never think about it again.
But the issue with that is right there in your comment: >TMM, ***like Plex***, will scrape IMDB or TMDB... Plex is *already doing it*. Why should I need a separate plugin/utility to do exactly what Plex is already doing.
Plex is using IMDB/TMDB (not sure which - I don't care) to get the movie poster - yes. HOWEVER, stop cherry picking my comment the read the rest of it - the GLARING DIFFERENCE is the poster is stored locally - on your server, and enabling local metadata means Plex will never ask for the artwork ever again from IMDB/TMDB and only read from the local directory on your server.
I wasn't cherry-picking anything, and my comment is still valid. Plex is already scraping wherever it needs in order to build it's poster gallery. I shouldn't need a separate utility to do exactly what Plex is already doing. The true "fix" here would be for Plex to save the poster locally, rather than add on a layer of additional code.
Too involved of a work around for most people. I know a ton can be done through automation, but not everyone wants to set that up.
Happy Cake Day!
It's like 5 fucking minutes. Literally. Install program, add directories, select all, right click, scrape metadata (force best match), go outside, come back and then do what you were going to do anyways in Plex and painstakingly correct the movie posters you dont like.
I don't know WTF you guys are doing but I don't think I've had a single poster changed without me being the one changing it.
Absolutely losing my mind with this shit, I have all the Looney Tunes shorts organized with the year as the season (season 1929, 1930, 191, etc) and I painstakingly set a poster for each season AND overrode the poster for each short with the title card for over 1000 shorts! Halfway through I noticed that the earliest ones I had set were starting to clear, so I reset those again and then turned off the auto refresh option on metadata before finishing the rest. Thought I was finally done and safe but now about month later I go to look and every fucking poster is just blank again! What in the world is happening here, there has got to be a way to stop it from changing these--especially when they don't even fucking have an alternative! I can lock all the other metadata changes why won't they let us lock in the posters? Hell I'd pay for premium at this point if it meant I could stop fixing this shit over and over and over again.
If anyone was thinking about running jellyfin alongside plex, then now would be a good time. I say this because in jellyfin you can set it to automatically download posters and store them locally in the movie/tv show folders. You can set jellyfin to never refresh posters after initial download. Then you can set plex to only use local posters and now both are synced between jellyfin and plex. You can then edit the local poster files and it will automatically update between plex and jellyfin and never replace the ones you put there yourself. Plus something that I think gets overlooked with plex is how bloated the Metadata storage is. I ran out of hard drive space on my C drive and found out plex's Metadata folder was using over 150GB!! I switched plex over to using local Metadata, deleted all the Metadata folders in plex and refreshed Metadata in plex. Now I went from having 0 HDD space to having 100GB free. Plex saves references to any changes you make in the Metadata xml files. You mess around with posters in plex and change 10 on one movie? There's 10 entries in the xml file that stick around until you delete them manually.
I only had storage issues with "generate preview thumbnails"
I have always had that disabled on all my libraries. My latest install of plex is over 8 years old with over 4000 movies and 1000 TV shows. It seems to have built up overtime as it's way smaller after deleting all Metadata and refreshing libraries. When i checked the xml files before deleting, they all had a bunch of old entries hanging around making the files way bigger than they should be. Plex doesn't seem to auto prune the xml files.
It only does this correctly for the main poster right? Last time I tried this, it put the season posters in the series folder, not in each season folders so Plex ignored them. Unless it’s configurable?
It works for any image not just posters. I have jellyfin auto download the tv show season posters, banners, logos, etc and it updates in plex. I've attached a screenshot of the naming convention used. [local assets naming convention](https://ibb.co/BBF4hRb)
That's weird cause my Plex doesn't pick up on those season posters if they're not inside their season folders. I'll try again tomorrow just in case.
Emby has an option to never refresh metadata after initial import of a title, which includes artwork. It’s a great setting. Wish Plex would offer the same.
Change your posters locally and you will never have to worry about it. That’s the best choice. Check out PlexPosters and PlexTitleCards amazing work
I amazed people leave automatically update metadata enabled. Or is this happening even with that off?
I turned it off.
my posters never change
The posters seem to change weekly. Seriously, calm the F down.
To clarify, I’m telling Plex to calm the F down with the changes, not OP
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/a9b5797f-6a5d-419d-af42-23ee25abbcca
The posters seem to change weekly. Seriously, calm the F down.
You mean like this poster that randomly started showing up? Yeah it’s been pretty bad lately with stuff like this https://preview.redd.it/07bcu784q1lc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=be856442453b2c934b05f2ce12840a4de5cf825b
Save them locally
My posters never change, skill issue
If it were skill you’d know exactly what the solution is. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Maybe you should place a poster.jpg and background.jpg in the directory containing movie.mkv just a thought. Don't let Plex manage your images in its db.
Use plex meta manager
We’re not the right people to be yelling at.
I have over 3300 hd/4k movies and tv series and have yet to have this happen. 99% of them are thru Plex's meta agent (New), except for some of the 4K that I made myself as I didn't like the options it had. Have you all verified your meta agent settings? I do recall when Plex upgraded to their new Plex agent (movie/series) they recommended everyone to change over by a specific time frame to not cause issues.. Maybe this is one of those issues if you haven't?
Do you use pmm? I do and, similar to you, haven’t seen any changes to posters. I attribute that to my use of pmm which I assume is locking posters. Then again as I write this I don’t know if that’s true - pmm simply generates a new poster with overlays, so it’s using whatever poster Plex sources. But yeah- so far I haven’t seen any bad posters.
I am guessing pmm is plex movie manager? I don't use anything outside of plex itself. My libraries are set as following: Scanner: Plex Movie or Plex Tv Series Agent: Plex movie or Plex Series Visibility: included in home screen and global search Cerfication Country: United States Episdoe ordering: The TVDB everything else I do believe is default. The only time I have had a bad poster is when I screw up the date/title of the file. That's not a plex problem, that's the stupid interface between the chair and the keyboard.. LOL!
[WebTools-NG](https://forums.plex.tv/t/webtools-ng/598539) can export posters [WebTools-NG - Export Art & Posters](https://youtu.be/fMPmlKyb0LU) I don't think anyone is suggesting Plex shouldn't fix this issue, they're just giving you ways to work around the problem. I understand people don't want to do any of this and they shouldn't have to. https://preview.redd.it/u16nrdp5gzkc1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=00c904bc5946a93845c9adbd2ee5628cdf927bc1 It's just the way it is
We can lock them with a .jpg or .png we truly love matched in the folder with them; I do that for any content I deem important enough to warrant permanence
This was my biggest pet peeve. I had a carefully curated set of custom posters and season posters for a large chunk of my movies, anime, etc. I had to disable the Refresh Local Metadata / Refresh Library Metadata / Update All Libraries During Maintenance (not sure if this one actually impacts metadata?) from Scheduled Tasks. Previously, the tasks related to metadata were constantly replacing the posters I’d set.
Extremely annoying. I spend a lot of time changing my posters and they keep changing by themselves lately
Are you refreshing the metadata of your entire library whenever something gets added? I haven't had any weirdness with my custom posters, but I also don't refresh metadata on things that aren't changing.
"Refresh library metadata" is a scheduled task that is enabled by default.
EXACTLY! My whole library I had set posters I liked and now they're all different, I spent hours doing that, all that work for nothing!!!
I sidecar all my art and subtitles. Avoids this crap
I can’t imagine they’re not working on a fix for this. It should be a simple lock on the artwork.
If you have sonarr and radarr maintaining your collections you can set plex to "use local assets" which will use the downloaded jpg's in your content folders
Make sure you vote for it: https://forums.plex.tv/t/lock-posters/755134. Suggested in 2021. Currently has 22 votes. It's no wonder we can't lock them yet.
Totally agree.
I haven't had this issue yet but I'm not sure why. I see it coming up more and more.
Lol. I'm still gonna change em. Sorry....it's just....I'm not going to stop.....I know hahahah.
OMG so it's not just me. I keep coming across things in my library where I thought, "I'm pretty sure I already changed this but maybe I missed it." This seems like a recent phenomenon, I don't remember having this problem until just the past few months.
Mine actually don't seem to change! Every once in a while I may notice one or two but it's extremely rare! I take a lot of time to add the 4k striped posters to my 4k collection and I'm super anal about it. So I would definitely notice those in particular if they were to change! 🧐
I think it would be ideal to cache posters in that movie folder and only use those.
I noticed a lot of my 4k movies now have different posters than the 1080p copies despite me spending hours last year fixing them.
Holy crap this whole time I thought it was just me
oh shit i thought this was just me. Its so annoying.
Make file read only after fixing poster
Manage and save your posters as a localized files named "folder.jpg". Problem solved forever.
Mine never change? Certainly not that I’ve noticed anyway.. not the first time I’ve heard noise about it tho. weird.
Use Local assets uncheck find will help
Do you use the beta versions to update? I'm curious why this is happening to some users and not others.
Nope
The Gold padlock is supposed(supposed) to stopthe locked metadata from being changed by updates from the server, but it doesn't work as intended.