I’ve been using Plex for three years on a Windows device to play my music collection. The accompanying phone app is amazing. Unfortunately, every four months or so, many of the albums within Plex suddenly have blurry album art. My pristine art has disappeared to be replaced by compressed pixilated files. I reinstall from a backup and everything is back to normal for maybe four months and it happens again.
It took me two years to figure out why. I’ll share my conclusions for those who’ve had this problem. Hopefully, you’ll save two years and learn to play guitar instead.
Every time, this happened to me, I noticed something about the Windows File Explorer folders containing the albums. The original jpg files of the album art are replaced by files with the exact name “folder.jpg”. These files are always exactly 200 x 200 pixels. Quite often, these folder.jpg files are hidden files that you can’t even see unless you’re looking for them and you know how to view hidden files.
I thought all of this was caused by Plex or iTunes. I was wrong. Windows Media Player is the culprit. This is a known issue with Windows Media Player—but since there are relatively few Plex users compared to Windows Media Player users, there isn’t much available online about this issue vis a vis Plex.
Background: software that rips CDs often names the album art “folder.jpg.” Windows Media Player is known to find album art that is called “folder.jpg” and will replace these files with compressed versions. Windows Media Player keeps the name “folder.jpg”-- so if you’re looking at the album folder in File Explorer, you might not recognize this has happened because the name of the album art remains “folder.jpg.”
If you have a Windows device and notice that SOME of your Plex album art is suddenly blurry, chances are this has occurred. To find out, check out the pixel size of the file within File Explorer by right clicking and looking at Properties. You’ll find that all of these new files called “folder.jpg” are exactly 200 x 200 pixels.
Quite often, the folder.jpg files are missing from File Explorer. If you see that there’s no album art in File Explorer but you are certain it was once there, chances are the folder.jpg files have become hidden files. For the tech impaired like me, this term “hidden files” means that File Explorer is keeping them invisible.
You can make the hidden folder.jpg files reappear in File Explorer by opening the album folder, choosing View/Options and checking “view hidden files.” These hidden files that suddenly reappear are, as mentioned above, always exactly 200 x 200 pixels because they are compressed versions of the previous jpg files.
Can Windows Media Player do this even if you don’t use the program for your music? Yes. If that program opens once by accident, your album art named folder.jpg will likely be replaced by compressed versions.
The only solution I’ve found is to rename every single album art file named folder.jpg to pretty much any other name. Also, it’s key to uninstall Windows Media Player before it happens again. If you’re a genius, you can alter Windows Media Player to stop doing this. I’m not. So goodbye Windows Media Player.
Every time I get a Windows Update, the first thing I do is uninstall Windows Media Player. Also, I’m going to save my music collection every few months and I won’t delete the old copies for maybe six months. In other words, assuming I do this every few months, I’ll have three or four old versions before I delete them. This way, if it ever happens again, I can go back to find a copy with the album art intact. I will also keep several copies of Plex just in case. I’ll even keep several old copies of the Plex registry key.
Plex should tell Windows Users to uninstall Windows Media Player before setting up a Music library. I’m not sure if the tech folks at Plex are even aware of this.
One improvement I’ve noticed is that while the folder.jpg files are hidden, Plex backs up a better version. In contrast to a few years ago when this first happened, Plex will keep your original album art somewhere. You can open an album within Plex and you’ll find you can replace the blurry art with your old art. Plex keeps it!! Even though this is an improvement, the problem is that while Plex might have a copy of your original album art, File Explorer won’t have it. Which means you are locked into using Plex forever.
Unless you think Plex will be around in thirty years, it’s a bad move to have Plex in control of your album art without your being able to see it within File Explorer. So you’re better off getting the original art and changing the names of the files from folder.jpg to anything else–before some Windows update reinstalls Windows Media Player without your realizing it.
One word about uninstalling Windows Media Player. It is a tricky endeavor because “Add Remove Programs” doesn’t work for Windows Media Player. Instead, you have to go to Start/Settings/Apps/Apps and Features. Then you have to choose “Optional Features.” At that point, you can scroll to find Windows Media Player and uninstall it.
Good luck. It took me two years to figure this out.
