Could Plex agents standardise the image size e.g. 150kb ?
After several days of scanning my dedicated 1TB Plex Server SSD, I found the Plex music agent to be adding some album/artist art which can be 1.5MB+ per album image.
Although that doesn’t sound like much, for users with large libraries it quickly ads up filling up a 1TB SSD in no time.
In my case I can not add my music library to Plex due to my 1TB SSD filling to capacity within 48 hours.
I was thinking to automate the resize process with 3rd party software but the downloaded images don’t use a standard image file extension.
Upon inspection of “Plex Media Server” using TreeSize App, I can see Plex Music agent has downloaded metadata (Album/Artist cover images) where some are in excess of 1.5MB each. This seems to be unnecessarily large - 150kb images are more than enough for clear album art.
Could the music agent in plex resize all downloaded cover art to a standard size i.e. 150kb.
I am not sure if either of the responses have understood my point even though it is in the subject line…
My question/suggestion is:
could metadata images be standardised to for example 150kb which would enable users like my self to add what @elan referred to as “huge” libraries.
An added benefit would be to the 1000’s of users with devices like the Shield which come with 16GB of storage that they could also add their not so huge libraries.
Not that it’s really relevant but I am testing with approximately 11TB of FLAC music files in Music / Artists / Albums folder format.
Have added them to Plex Server on Shield and Plex Server on Synology NAS (DSM 7).
On both servers the Plex Media Server folder / metadata contains much more than 1TB of metadata (images of albums and artists)
Upon inspection of these folders I am seeing images of albums and artists which are in my opinion unnecessarily large ie 1.5MB in size per image.
@trumpy81 these are “Music Library” FLAC files so none of those options you mentioned are available. Sonic Audio is not available on Android TV PMS and I think it would take 5 years plus to scan it on the NAS so I haven’t enabled that on the NAS.
Plexamp times out as per this post so I can’t tell you exactly.
There may be some mp3 files there also but I’d say your calculation is accurate give or take 20%.
It seems like my NAS is too slow to deal with this amount of data.
But when I managed to add it to the Shield PMS it was running reasonably well except I’d run out of metadata storage due to the reason in this post.
I can’t help to get a feeling from your responses that there is not really much interest in optimising the image size within the metadata folders - Im really surprised tbh, if I was in a position to make the product I work on more efficient and save 1000’s of people storage then I’d jump at it and push it home.
I did read in another Plex forum post that metadata was not removed when libraries were removed so users would have 3 sets of the same metadata but I have wiped the drive and/or the shield 5 times and on the NAS twice deleted the Plex Media Server drive.
Initially I thought the DB was getting corrupted on the shield so thought to copy the PMS from NAS to Shield - this takes 3 days thanks to Fat 32 file system (ext Plex formatted ssd drive) that’s when I confirmed both NAS and Shield produce pretty much the same amount of metadata.
I also have the duties of being the Synology packaging engineer (the guy who makes Plex run on DSM)
To count the number of files indexed is VERY simple;
Open FileStation
In the left pane, right-click the shared folder(s) containing your media
Properties
Let DSM give you a total number of files.
As for your NAS being too slow? It’s a D2700 dual core (DSx13 or older series) ??
If so, then YES, you’re expecting far more from that 400 Passmark machine than it can so AS the Plex server. It can shovel data great as a NAS but it doesn’t have the minimum 900 Passmarks needed to run Plex effectively.
IMHO,
Let it be the good NAS it is
Transfer the server data (the PMS files) to another machine which has the processing power.
As supplemental FYI, The D2700s are all about to be removed from the NAS compatibility list due to their inability to satisfy PMS’ needs.
I’m very clear about yours and @trumpy81’s positions yet there are times where users get taken around the block 10 times before any progress is made to moving the issues up the ladder.
Firstly I would suggest reading between the lines and identifying the level of the end-user you are communicating with and second respect the fact that some end users may be engineers them selves but try to help users by spending a lot of their own “unpaid” work on troubleshooting Plex issues in order to make the product better for others and you could go as far as to say to make the owners and employees of Plex more money long term.
I have received some very unclear responses from your self in this post which just means I have to re-write the post 3 times to make is excessively clear what the issue is before its taken seriously. FYI I have spent a good 20-30 hours not to mention the amount of time waiting for things to copy across or index files before even thinking this was a Plex issue and way before thinking I would submit it here.
If you just click on my username I think you will see this issue has been discussed several times on different sub-forums and other sites before I worked out that its the size of the images that could be causing this issue - you might think well thats very simple but its not when u r dealing with 11TB on a DS1813+.
The DS1813+ is an amazing device considering its age - runs Docker containers and other applications just fine but its terrible with PMS.
The ONLY reason I installed PMS on the NAS was only for testing to see if the Metadata would end up also being the size they are on SHIELD, which btw runs fine with the music etc but the storage is the issue thus my testing and post.
Anyway all this is very level 1 Helpdesk stuff so I won’t go on just saying respect the people that volunteer their time to this product.
And lastly 11TB of tiny files in the Plex folder isn’t “easy” to get - File Station literally takes a day to list them or it just asks you to log in again (not cause of the security timeout) and you can start again.
yes, I was a bit surprised my self - its not a bad thing just an issue with large music libraries.
There are currently no external SSD’s on the market that can hold album art at this size for a large library - I don’t think technically Plex can implement a resize feature, how about a file size filter in PMS settings rather than just setting one size on the back-end?
Small 50-100kb
Medium 100-250kb
High - 250 - 500kb
No limit
The scan has finally finished, every bundle has ultra large images
even though there is still no control over the size/quality of music album/artist art downloaded from online metadata sources, I think this could be a workaround for those of us with large libraries where metadata blows out to several terabytes…
