I’d like to +1 this too. I have my music library set to ‘Plex Music Only’ for album art, and whenever I add new music it’s a dice roll as to whether high resolution album art is selected. Sometimes it is, and that’s great. When it’s not (and like others on this thread I often use Plexamp to check) I edit the album and look at the poster options. Sometimes there’s only 1, so fair enough, not much Plex can do in that situation. More often, though, there’s a selection to choose from, and they seem to be sorted in order of quality from lowest → highest. Often picking the last option in the list gives the best results.
I’m guessing album art is pulled from Musicbrainz, but regardless, with each metadata refresh it should be possible for Plex to determine the resolution of each of the covers it receives and decide which to select based on a user preference. ‘Always use the highest resolution artwork’, ‘Choose artwork that’s at least x by y’, something like that.
Please provide exact examples (album and artist name, or even better the mbid or Plex guid).
Try this: add the album ‘I Am Not There Anymore’ by The Clientele, released July 2023, to your library.
Plex GUID: plex://album/64471be9fc3be59477a53009 Musicbrainz link
If your experience is anything like mine, Plex will retrieve two possible cover options. The first, selected by default, will be low resolution. The second, which you can select manually by editing the item in the UI, is much better. It’d be good if Plex could automatically select the higher quality option. I don’t know where Plex pulls cover art from, but the cover available via the Musicbrainz link above is of a higher quality than the default option retrieved by Plex.
I have gone through nearly my entire album library and copied high-quality album cover images…twice. This issue definitely creeps back up at some point in time. What is even more crazy is that this happens to my Tidal album covers as well. Some, but not all, just like my local albums. It looks like there are many of us in this thread who want to help solve the problem, so anything we can do to assist the Plex team, please ask us!
I can’t tell if it’s just coincidence, but I’ve only encountered this problem on windows. My mac iphone and linux installs have always had great looking art. Forward slash OS supremacy.
I just had the exact same issue with my server running on Windows. It kept defaulting almost everything to 200x200. I figured out that despite having a much higher quality embedded in the songs, it would read the windows auto-generated album art and use that as the default if there was no cover.jpg saved (this was the case with most of my music as I have a lot of singles). The solution was just saving a cover.jpg in every single album folder which seems to take priority over the windows auto-generated one.
For those that need a quick way to do the same:
Drag all of your music folders into Musicbrainz Picard.
Make sure all the music is in the left pane so other tags don’t change.
Disable the move and rename options.
Enable the save cover images as separate files option.
Please, for all that’s holy in this universe, leave the album art I’ve already selected (most of the time personally uploaded) as the selected artwork for the album! Getting exhausted, having to change album art back from 1980’s-era 16-bit images. I mean, at least weekly, if not daily
