@OttoKerner said:
@“deeylye@gmail.com” said:
All my movie mp4s already have embedded metadata, including the cast info, which must have been entered by whoever wrote the original files. If I load them into my library without any amendments to the metadata, then the actor photos appear. However, if I make any changes to the actor metadata e.g. literally a cut-and-paste of the list of names in Amvidia or MetaZ, and then add the files to my library, the photos disappear leaving behind just the initials of the actors. So Plex still recognises and displays the correct list of actors but without their pictures (unless I then switch the primary Agent to TMD instead of LMA). All I’m doing is effectively the same as the original writer of the mp4; we are both supplying the actor info by embedding the file with metadata. So how comes when I do it, TMD only half recognises the actors and only lists their names without the pics? Weird?
My explanation would be that the first time around, Plex isn’t reading the cast info from your file. (Which is a bug, but one that is to your advantage in this particular situation.)
At second try, it is behaving correctly and replaces the cast info with the data from your file.
I recommend you to pull down the Local Media Assets anyway.
Why do you like to have it at the top?
So it incorrectly ignores the metadata if I haven’t amended it but then reads it wrong when it has been changed?! That is very strange and irrational but something I’ll have to live with I guess! Thanks very much for all your effort in helping me understand what might be going on and for replying to me so quickly! Much appreciated 
As for why LMA…I prefer everything being labelled (in my personal opinion) correctly, sensibly and in a style that I like (in essence, yes, I’m a pedantic control freak.)
For example, TMD would load ‘Fate of the Furious’ as the title and sort title for that particular film. But I’d want ‘Fate Of The Furious (2017)’ title and ‘The Fast And The Furious - 8. Fate Of The Furious (2017)’ as the sort title; I find uncapitalised letters ugly/untidy and think it’s better if movies in a series/franchise line-up next to each other.
Yup, I could just overwrite the metadata (whether it is being pulled by LMA or TMD) directly in Plex and then lock the fields, but I’d rather correct everything at source (in the file itself), hence why I’ve been using Amvidia and MetaZ.
Unfortunately a third metadata editor I was originally using would match my file to a movie in its database but load the cast with a ‘I’ instead of a comma separating each actor i.e. Vin Diesel I Jason Statham I Dwayne Johnson I Michelle Rodriguez… I didn’t realise this until I’d rewritten over the original metadata for all my movies and saw that Plex couldn’t display the cast correctly or search by actor. So to fix the problem, I did a ‘cut - find and replace - cut and paste’ of the list of actors and re-wrote all the files, but it only half worked because, as aforementioned, it’s only loading the actors’ initials, not their photos. I have 900+ movies in this situation 
If there’s no meta-editing or Plex fix, then the only solution left is to hunt for and re-download all those mp4s again. That would be crazy and I’m not that desperate (yet!)
So now, for the latest movies that I’ve been editing, I don’t use that problematic metaeditor and certainly never dabble with the cast in Amvidia or MetaZ; only tweak the title, sort title and genre where necessary. So those all load up beautifully.
