Server Version#: 1.27.2.5929
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.85.1
Docker Image: 1.27.2.5929-a806c5905
Recently I’ve noticed that a bunch of album art on my Plex music library has been changed to use significantly lower resolution images. I’m not currently sure how many albums have been affected, and it’s definitely not the majority of albums in my library, but it’s definitely enough that I frequently find affected albums while exploring my “Fresh” smart-playlist. I did not initiate this myself so I’m not really sure what’s going on.
I originally thought that it might’ve been an issue with a recent Plexamp update, but it seems that the issue that the actual artwork has been changed (which I’ve checked via Plex’s web client).
Are there any circumstances in which the artwork would automatically be changed?
This has been an issue for a few weeks and hasn’t resolved itself. All of my media has embedded artwork, but the actual media itself hasn’t changed since I originally added it (well before this issue started). I don’t have Prefer local metadata enabled, so my current theory is that the metadata provider might’ve changed the available artwork variants and Plex somehow defaulted to a lower resolution version.
No this is not the same issue. The referenced issue talks about missing artwork. What we’re seeing here is poor quality artwork.
I see this happening on any item where I haven’t specifically overridden the poster selection. I think what’s happening is when Plex auto-updates items, it’s simply pulling down the first item it finds, which in this case happens to be poor-quality artwork. I’ve noticed this seems to be happening a lot with the various music metadata databases so it’s clearly a source data issue.
Why doesn’t Plex do the same thing that Calibre does for its book covers?
First, it downloads all candidates.
Next, it sorts them by size (not sure if it uses just raw filesize or based on pixel count; I think it’s the latter).
Finally, it presents them to the user in that sorted order, ensuring the theoretically best-quality image is presented first.
Plex really should do something similar, especially when auto-updating.
Note, this only makes sense for poster assets, esp. when updating automatically, as normally the only real difference is in image quality; backgrounds are likely to vary too much.
Sorry, but it absolutely does not. I’ve seen that again and again, for years.
Yes, Plex downloads multiple candidates, but then it clearly simply presents them in the order it discovered them, with no meaningful processing done afterward.
It’s just when updating posters manually, it’s usually obvious which ones to avoid.
Same issue. I just upgraded to 1.28.0.05999 and then ran a metadata refresh. Seems like only the artist pictures profile were updated. All artwork/porter are still low rez. The only way to change the quality i could found was to edit the album and pick up a new poster. This seems to force a refresh.
I have hundreds of CD. I hope there is another way to do this ?
Is this still not fixed? Why are we using Plex when features we rely on are getting removed against community feedback and now our metadata isn’t even correct? Sigh. Are movies not going to play after the next update too?
We are witnessing the death knell of Plex going all into streaming services while displaying such lack of regard towards their core user base to allow these to slip through QA. I’m still waiting for someone from Plex to explain to us how the mishandling of Plex Desktop advertise as player is somehow resolved by Plex HTPC when that application doesn’t have mouse support by design and the overlap of mouse and advertise as player users may as well be 1:1 based on feedback.
It’s probably worth pointing out that a number of albums with different artwork variants were modified to use different covers as well (when this issue was triggered).
