The watchlist lives on plex.tv
It only stores the guid of a video, nothing else.
(it is intentionally built that way, to make it impossible to determine whether a movie on your watch list is actually stored on your server or not.)
Therefore when looking at the watchlist, the app is referring to watch.plex.tv for all other metadata about that movie.
A lot of users would have issues with privacy I’m sure which would be another headache for Plex. This was a deliberate design, your media on PMS and Watchlist are not in the same place… Plex hardly knows what’s going on with your personal media by design. Is that right @OttoKerner?
uhm yeah … no. that’s kinda way too oversimplified.
the logic about what ends up displayed on a client’s screen should execute locally.
if it doesn’t, there’s a whole other problem.
if whatever shows up on a local roku client for it to plaster out onto an HDMI wire isn’t getting built for painting by the local server what’s painting it?
but, to your point, where it’s loaded from is the local server
I don’t really want to go down a packet-tracing or JS-debugger rabbit hole.
if watchlist is intended to be an online-only feature, then
a) that really sux balls, and
b) the devs should say so.
As I understand it, the Watchlist was designed to purely be a way for you to “favorite” media found on Plex’s own metadata site. So, when a client enters the watchlist feature you are immediately taken outside your server’s environment, and to your online account where it has saved the list of (plex) GUIDS of movies/shows you want on the list. Until you click on a particular entry, it doesn’t even query your own server to detect whether you have a copy of the media itself (and even when it does, it’s just so it can place a clickable link to your server’s copy to view it).
Since the client doesn’t query your server for custom artwork until you access your own media, it allows a nice layer of separation between Plex’s database of media and your own server.
Thinking about it, it sounds like the data Plex saves about your account doesn’t include ANY reference to what your servers contain. This way, Plex’s account system could be compromised by hackers (or movie co’s) and would still be unable to identify anything about what your server contains.
I understand your desire for the posters. I guess we’ve just all been so focused on getting you to understand that it is either an intended FEATURE or a side-effect of how they implemented the watchlist.
As a feature, it provides a large amount of anonymity to people who are rather concerned about their privacy.
As a side-effect of how they implemented it, it would quite likely require a complete re-write of the watchlist, to require the watchlist to query every single server you own/have-access-to to figure out if the movie uses custom posters. And even if it did, what happens if your account happens to be subscribed to a dozen or so different servers? How would it determine the appropriate poster to display if 2 or more servers have the video in their library? All I could think about to get that working would be to force the watchlisted item to be SPECIFICALLY for that video item in that specific library of that specific server. Which would have to be saved to the account. Which would really break the privacy protections a LARGE amount of users would quit over.
(Yes, most of us are probably going to only have the single server/library, but Plex was designed for people to be able to use more than one server at once seamlessly. To support that, the watchlist must use generic GUID info, which has a default poster that cannot be changed)
Sorry rob’s grandma, I love your cookies, but it’s just how the program is. You could possibly post a Feature Suggestion to see how much interest there is for such a change.
You keep calling it a bug. Saying it’s so doesn’t MAKE it one. As I said, it’s an INTENTIONAL side-effect of the implementation of their Universal Watchlist. It’s universal in that the content in this list could be of items not on your own server, or even not released yet. So it very much IS consistent UX design to have consistent “official” posters for entries in this list, rather than prioritizing the (possibly) one or two entries in the list that have posters that are non-standard (or possibly troll-like, since a server owner can place any graphic for the poster).
I don’t think the local server does know what is on the watchlist. Each client has a button (WATCHLIST) that - when pressed - retrieves a list of GUIDS saved on your online Plex account. These GUIDS, when queried by the client, return the metadata (name, poster, actors, plot) from Plex’s metadata site for that GUID. Some of the metadata entries can be the TVDB or IMDB or TMDB GUID, for easy linkage to alternate metadata site sources.
Note, I am not a Plex employee, so my statement that “submitting a feature request” is a “kafka-esque move for Plex” seems odd. I am just offering a potential solution to your issue, while also attempting to reach an understanding on the stance Plex itself has taken with this new feature.
While I understand you may not like that behavior, It isn’t a bug and is intentional. That is not to say it may not change some day.
The watchlist is saved remotely at plex.tv for your account. We intentionally don’t want to know what is on your server and don’t know things like the non default or custom movie posters you may have chosen. That is why we call it the Universal Watchilst in docs Universal Watchlist (Beta) | Plex Support
Things added to the watchlist can be available from multiple sources. A user might have added a thing from their server, from friend server, from Discover, or when watching a trailer in Plex for something that is not available to stream anywhere yet.
When you click on an item in the watchlist and go to the details page it is a Universal Detail page, not the details page exclusively from your server which the item might not even be available on. That universal details page then loads all the sources that item ID is available for the account that is signed in in the “Watch from these locations” row next to the poster.
(movie library) or 
(tv library)
(movie library) or 
(tv library)