What has happened to the cast photos this week in Plex? It’s obvious they are not pulling from TMDB anymore. Where are these new photos coming from? Many actor who have passed had photos of them in the prime of their careers, but now been replaced with photos of them at death’s door. Actors who are deceased should not be remembered by the last photo ever taken of them. Where are these photos coming from now? Why has this change been made, and is there a way for us to contribute more flattering photos?
I understand copyright concerns, but not having any ability to correct cast information or add photos locally is already a major pain point with Plex, and I’m concerned that what little ability we had to contribute to this is now gone. Local edits takes away copyright problems for Plex. Why can’t this be an option similar to adding crew information? And adding local art on the actor’s profile page in our own database? I’m dumbfounded as to why Plex chooses to keep cast as basically the only thing we can’t edit locally when there are no fool-proof places to pull the data.
At least the option to contribute/correct TMDB was available, but for someone like me that has OCD issues and needs everything to be as accurate as possible, locked cast and cast photos is very painful. There is a reason there are whole websites and message boards dedicated to creating poster art – we need visually consistency, and attention to detail is important. Help it make sense.
The bulk of my collection is 80s television, so a lot of the actors are no longer living, and their photos are now all of them in the last days of life. Robert Guillaume even has a big bruise on his cheek because the photo is when he was very ill.
This is just one example, and it’s very disrespectful. 100’s of photos have been replaced with pictures of elderly actors. Rue McClanahan, Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore, there are just so many.
Can you please explain why Plex is so resistant to allowing us local editing on casts and actors within our own collections? I just don’t get it. This would also solve so many issues when series or films don’t match correctly (like when multi-episode mini-series are showing as films in Plex).
EDIT: As someone who was a supporter of the new modern agent/scanner I’m beginning to feel I was sold a lemon. The more and more changes they make the worse things are getting. If the new nfo support and/or custom agent development support they have toted at the fireside does not pan out it’ll be even harder to swallow these changes.
I’m now even considering moving my library back to the legacy version and giving this one the two fingers …
Not really. You’d have to take the nuclear approach and delete your libraries and set them up again using the old agent/scanner. You may even need to downgrade the server to older version and stick with it as plex will likely remove this option early next year. You’d also loose all the benefits of the new agent like performance, shared cast between libraries etc… but you’d also gain back as you can configure it against a specific metadata source, like tmdb.
To be honest, I’ll likely not do it. Not because of the work but if I was going to do all that I’d just move to emby and be done with it.
They may have answered what has changed but provided no solution to the issue when the new photos are horrendous. That photo I posted above is unacceptable. We shouldn’t be stuck with unflattering photos of actors, particularly once they’ve passed.
