Hey there! I did a reset of Windows 10 on my PC, but before doing that I made a backup of my Plex Media Server folder and put that on an external hard drive. So now that I’ve reinstalled Plex Media Server on my fresh install of Windows, I’ve decided to create a new music library. I’m totally fine with just letting the server get new metadata for almost everything, but I’d really like to use all of the artist posters from my Plex backup if possible because I went through and changed hundreds of the artist photos to different ones that I preferred, and in many cases I went and found photos through Google images and manually cropped them. Is there anyway for me to copy and paste just the artist posters from my backup or do I just need to be at peace with changing the artist posters that I dont like manually again?
Was the backup drive formatted with NTFS? If not, the hardlinks did not survive the copying process, thus the manual selection of posters/photos/cover art was not retained.
If you are going the extra mile and create artist photos you like, store them in your file system. Don’t paste them into the ‘Edit’ dialog of Plex.
Same applies to cover art and other artwork.
Here is how this should work for music:
possible ‘side car’ files for music
I would do this, but I believe the folder artist name needs to be the same as the metadata name for it to work, and I don’t always do this. I sort all of my artists alphabetically in the folder structure (Smashing Pumpkins, The), but not in the metadata. The Smashing Pumpkins get automatically sorted alphabetically without “The” in my actual library, but windowa explorer does not behave this way, and so I move “The” to the end of the band name.
Unless I am mistaken, I don’t believe the way I do things works with Plex?
Also, my current Windows user name is different than my previous one, and my music is stored in my Music folder within my User folder, so im sure you can see the complications here. If i knew my way around SQL I’d manually change all of the directories to the new user name, but alas I am not sure id be able to do that competently enough without messing something else up along the way.
Not necessarily. As long as your meta tags are consistent, it might work with music.
Avoid using the pre-defined structure for your data. It works much better with a separated folder location.
Make a backup copy of your Plex database prior to editing it. That way you can restore it if you mess up. [HowTo] Plex database modification - Moving media the right/wrong way - #10 by jelwell
But this will only fix the database.
The cover art selections are stored in hard links, (i.e directly in the file system and not in the database) which have already been destroyed by your backup process.
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