When using a custom TV metadata provider, refreshing metadata manually will make posters appear correctly for a TV series and its seasons. However, later (presumably during maintenance) the posters for TV seasons only are “de-selected”, meaning the seasons will suddenly show up with a blank cover image (like an unmatched show). This does not happen with Plex Series scanner, tested on an alternate library.
Observations:
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Certain shows will be missing their posters for some, or all, seasons depending on the client. In the web UI, seasons 1-3 may have posters selected, while 2-8 do not, but 9-12 do. The same show on a Roku may be missing all posters. On mobile, all posters except 1 may be visible. I personally can’t find a pattern.
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The primary show poster is never missing.
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When a poster is missing from a season:
- If the provider/agent can find a poster for that season, it is visible in Edit Season => Posters and needs to be re-selected
- If the provider/agent can’t find a poster for that season, i think plex should be auto-assigning the show primary poster as the season poster, but it’s not (it remains blank).
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Custom shows (intentionally unmatched with custom artwork) seem unaffected
As a side note, just in case it’s related, I have noticed that my custom metadata agent will only pull in a single poster for each season (the first one), even if there are multiple posters available via the agent’s source. The main poster for the entire series still pulls in all the available options from the source though. This may be unrelated, but I thought it was worth mentioning. I’m looking into fixing this with the agent code, but it likely exists in the TMDB example too (I haven’t tested that one though).
Server Version#: 1.43.0.10467
Player Version#: Different behavior across different clients (tested on latest versions of web, TCL/Hisense Rokus, and Android phone)
My TVDB-only metadata provider: GitHub - Drewpeifer/plex-meta-tvdb: A custom metadata provider for Plex that only uses TheTVDB I host that repo so i can answer any questions, but it is intended to be a 1:1 match with the TMDB example provided by Plex: GitHub - plexinc/tmdb-example-provider . I made 2 slight modifications to year-based matching logic and eng lang metadata, but nothing specific to posters.
Example: MST3K in web UI is missing only season 2 poster
MST3K in android app (galaxy S25) is missing all season posters, and for some reason shows Logo instead of Poster when inside series (that might be intended on mobile though).
