So I’ve noticed this issue where album art disappears randomly. I have added cover art in all my tracks and have my music library set to “Prefer Local Metadata” and Album Art to “Both Plex and Music Files” which should prefer local metadata if available.
So what I’ve noticed is, that upon a new library creation (I recently rebuilt my music library on a mac server, and then even more recently built a new Ubuntu based PMS and rebuilt all libraries from scratch) the local cover art appears to be read and is fine, but later on it just disappears and becomes a blank gray square. Doing a “Refresh Metadata” on the album will bring the cover art back, but then disappears some time later.
This happened on my old PMS on MacOS and also happens on my new Ubuntu based PMS; both had brand new music libraries created after the new Plex Music agent was introduced. Both were/are using the new “Plex Music” scanner/agent and both have “Local Media Assets” at the top of the Artist and Album agents.
I have also inspected some of the files of the albums that came up with missing art; they appear to be totally fine. The art is in .jpg format and is a reasonable size (most are between 500x500 to 1000x1000; I’m not sure if there’s a requirement, but I have many others that type and size and no issue with those).
If I do a “Refresh Metadata” it will find it the artwork and display it properly… for a few days, then it goes back to being a gray circle. I think it has something to do when Plex “refreshes local metadata every three days”. It seems to coincide with that.
I’ve had this issue on occasion (an hour ago in fact). Typically shutting down your plex media server, then starting it back up (just the plex media server software) has resolved the issue for me. There is a separate process for handling Metadata that seems to bug out at random. Sometimes just closing plex and restarting it does not resolve the issue (I’m guessing because the metadata process and various other plex processes such as transcoding were still running). In these cases, I would either close all of the individual processes, or just give the entire system a reboot.
Anyone know what’s going on here? Still happening on certain albums. I refresh metadata and the covers come back, but then disappear at some point later. Always the same albums.
Still having this issue. I’ve tried moving the cover art out of the files (embedded) and into a sidecar file (folder.jpg) and that unfortunately didn’t work. Strangely, it is always the same albums, although I can’t find out why; it’s the same 5-6 albums.
Here’s another example? Why? I’ve had the cover art both ways; embedded in the files and as a sidecar file and I still get a blank cover art image. The art will be there for a little while, then disappears. If I do a Refresh Metadata it comes back for a little while, then disappears again.
@ChuckPa@tom80H Was wondering if you guys had a minute to look into this. I’m at a loss on where to go from here. There’s definitely an issue here, just not sure where. What else can I test or look into to track this issue down?
Sorry… I’ve never seen this (or don’t remember it).
You said it only happens for the same 5-6 albums – anything specific about those (e.g. different file types, poster embedded having a different format, no poster in the 1st file of the album…)?
Also… what version of Plex Media Server do you have installed (is 1.18.3 from the original post still valid?) and on which version of macOS are you running it?
That’s the thing, they are all basically the same. All of the artwork files were embedded .jpg;s in mp3’s, but I recently took them out and tried putting them as a sidecar .jpg files to see if that changed anything; no deal. Within a few days the art disappeared on all of them again. To answer your question, the artwork was in all files (including the first file) of the album.
This happened on my old MacOS PMS and shortly after I created the first post in this thread I rebuilt my PMS server on a NUC8 on Ubuntu 19.10… same thing. Which leads me to believe it is soemthing with the files… but what else if not the artwork? Not sure what else to check.
PMS is 1.19.1.2645 on Ubuntu 19.10 currently; when I first made this thread I had PMS on MacOS 10.9.5 I believe. Has been an issue since at least 1.18.3 or even earlier.
Not too sure now if I manually matched them. Don’t think so, since I think I’ve done that like two times I think. I could be wrong though. I have PMS set to “Prefer Local Metadata”. I also rebuilt all my libraries from scratch when I changed hardware.
can you double-check if the album(s) in question are matched or not.
does the poster disappear when you scan your library for updates or just at random?
Is there another way to check? That is the only way I know how to figure it out.
The posters do not disappear when I scan for updates; I can’t make them disppear as far as I know. The only way I can get to covers to come back is to choose “Refresh Metadata” on each individual album (‘Refresh All Metadata’ on my entire music library does not work). After a few days the covers disappear again.
This way is fine…
If you want to go deeper into this rabbit hole you could also open the Get Info dialog via the track’s ... context menu. If you open the View XML link, you can check out the GUID entries in that XML file.
I just noticed… that’s not actually helpful with audio files (provides agent and matching details if used for tv episodes or movies).
There’s been a different thread with a similar problem where this issue seemed to be caused by the scheduled tasks during a weekly update of the files. As with your example; refreshing the metadata for that album fixed the poster.
Similar workaround; no common root cause
@tom80H I’ll go as deep as I can to figure this out. Haha. Anything else I could check to investigate this? If not, may be you could help by submitting a bug report to the devs on this.
I’m having the exact same problem. Latest and greatest server version and Synology NAS version. It’s very frustrating. I’ve tried deleting the cache, rebuilding the library, even rebuilding Plex from scratch on my NAS (Synology) etc… Nothing has worked so far. The problem began about 6 to 9 months ago and I assumed it would get resolved with an update but it has not.
Maybe we can compare notes and see if there is something common about our config / situation. I would love to resolve this. For me it’s about 5% of my cover art. I just want Plex to display the cover art embedded in my files like it used to. I can get the web app to be 100% correct with lots of refreshing metadata but later some of them revert to missing (blank). I can’t get the iOS app to display correctly nor the Apple TV app because there is no refresh metadata option on those apps, and if there was, I would most likely get this the same issue as the web app were cases revert to blank.
Let me know if I can help with the debugging effort on this somehow
