Seriously this is ridiculous. I did the upgrade to 1.28.0.05999. I followed the solution in the other thread and did a “plex dance” to fix the issue with existing album that had low resolution posters. Because of that i had to redo all the changes i did manually for albums like bootleg. I was done at about 75% but today the problem is back and it’s even worst. I’m getting some “bluish” poster version of album now or as other are pointing out some variants.
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I honestly think the solution is to switch to Jellyfin or Emby. If your client keeps regressing to the point of users posting how-to guides to permanently downgrade it then your service jumped the shark and the last thing you should be doing is attempting growth in other areas while giving your core users nothing but neglect. Wake me in 4 months when this gets resolved and we get more PR speak about how features people love should be removed because the internal Plex product teams asked for it even though I doubt any of them actually use this app in the first place. Sigh.
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I upgraded my server to 1.28.1.6104 yesterday and then manually ran “Refresh Metadata” on an affected album as per the recommendation. This didn’t appear to have any effect, so I then decided to run it again with the server console open in a separate window to see if anything suspicious was being reported - and there was! My Plex database had become corrupt (possibly due to a recent power outage) and, as a result, Plex was unable to refresh metadata properly. After rebuilding indexes I ran “Refresh Metadata” again and it seemed to be able to update (and appears to have fixed the artwork resolution issue). I then ran a full “Refresh Metadata” on the entire library, which seems to have fixed most affected albums, but also replaced some artwork with photos of physical album covers, and replaced the cover & summary for at least one album with that of an entirely different artist! I’m fairly certain that at least the latter issue is the result of upstream metadata / artwork being incorrect.
It’s also worth noting that the changes may not immediately show up in Plexamp, depending on downloads, etc.
The above solution rebuilding indexes didn’t work for me. I think it has more to do with the art itself saved in the Plex Music servers because some artists work fine (Minori Chihara, Machico, True, Momo Asakura, Sora Amamiya) and some don’t (Millet, TrySail, LiSA) and they just used to work fine, is like they changed the background pic in their servers to a low quality one, and when you refresh metadata it pulls down the lowq pic, in my case is the only thing that is low quality the background image. Is there a way to check the Plex Music data? In last.fm you can find the backgrounds in hq but is a chore changing it manually.
Why wake you if you have left? Enjoy your time elsewhere!
It’s kind of incredible that 2 months have passed and this still isn’t fixed. See you guys in another 2 months to keep this thread alive.
Well my images were fixed for a while, but now they’ve gone back to the second selection in the list of album art (the low res one).
Not fixed. New albums added to Plex still default to the second choice in the poster picker, which is usually low res local assets, even though this is not the preferred choice.
All this time later and I still have to load into Plex Dash every other day to fix ugly, compressed album art >_>
I’m not certain but I could swear that a lot of the affected albums I come across are ones I had already fixed once, only to be undone again in a ridiculous cycle
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Yep. Pretty ridiculous
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For what it’s worth, this does still seem to be somewhat of an issue. It did seem to improve for a while, but I’ve added new music and had Plex choose missing artwork over actual artwork for several albums, even when there were clearly better options available.
I am sad that this is not fixed yet
This seems to resurface occasionally as Plex decides to automatically refresh metadata. I’ve seen certain albums switch to different artwork recently while plex was running an automatic metadata refresh.
Still not fixed. Refreshing metadata still picks low resolution artwork . Embedded artwork also not detecting.
I am also still experiencing this issue. I confirmed my embedded artwork and folder.jpg are high resolution. I even find artwork that I have previously “fixed” have reverted back to poor quality weeks later. Very frustrating!
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Same here. Super frustrating.
I’ve manually uploaded a ton of artwork simply because Plex for 70%+ of the cases shows low quality artwork, even on new albums that I bought on Bandcamp.
So is this going to be fixed?
The originally reported issue was fixed.
Please provide more specific information on how to reproduce the problem so it can be investigated.
I do believe that the original issue that was happening was resolved in the update mentioned in this thread, but there are still things happening that have symptoms that are similar enough that people are still finding this thread.
I’ve definitely still had some issues with artwork (both album and artist) switching to low res images, but I think the actual cause is different than the issue that was originally addressed. It seems that as part of Plex’s regular housekeeping cycle the metadata for albums, artists, etc. get updated periodically and in some cases this results in the album / artist art being changed (often times to an image that happens to be lower resolution, or in some cases poor quality photo scans of album art). Since this seems to be happening as part of one of Plex’s automated processes, I don’t have a definitive way to reproduce it - but it definitely still happens. I’m not sure if it’s due to upstream image availability changing or what. In one recent case I had artist artwork automatically change to an image of another band that shared the same name after several years of not having any problems.
Like I mentioned above, I’m not really sure which automated process seems to be triggering the artwork to change but it’s definitely been happening automatically. In some cases it’s helpful (I’m fairly certain King Crimson used to have an “Artist Artwork Unavailable” image (that was pulled from an upstream source) for a while before it automatically changed), but in many cases where the system already seems to be operating as intended, the thing that get’s noticed is when the artwork switches to something worse.
I do want to bring up some QoL changes I’d personally like to see regarding the general UI for selecting artwork, banners, posters, etc., via the regular Plex web UI. Personally I’d like to see:
- The ability to see the image codec, resolution, and file size in the Poster / Background / Banner / etc. views. In some cases, this is the only way to differentiate between multiple images.
- The ability to preview a larger version of the artwork to get a better idea of the quality of the image. Currently my process for checking artwork quality involves setting the artwork via the web UI, and then checking the artwork quality via Plexamp.
- The ability to remove manually added (via file or URL) artwork entries that aren’t going to be used. I’ve had several situations where I’ve updated the artwork for albums that don’t have automatic metadata only to later find better images and switch to those. From the selection window, album / artist view / etc, both images may look nearly identical, but the difference is extremely obvious in Plexamp. In cases like this, I’d prefer to simply remove the older manually added artwork to prevent the artwork from potentially automatically switching back to the undesirable one. Referring back to my first point, it may be useful to include the “date added” as well, since that’s probably the only information the user has immediately on hand without manually checking the file.
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Just want to add a +1 to this. I’ve recently noticed a severe degradation of album art quality which led me to this thread. The degradation did not coincide with a server update. It’s possible it was a Plexamp client update. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that it’s difficult to tell the quality of the selected image in the Plex web interface because album art is presented in a fairly small footprint.
Running “Refresh Metadata” has no apparent effect. It’s certainly not using the image embedded in the audio files.
I use Plexamp on my livingroom TV, and so the low-res art is especially jarring.
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