don’t worry, a year from now we’ll be celebrating a decade old BAREBONES BASIC Feature Request with this one…
9 years and they still wont provide a simple feature that many MANY people want? Do they even look at these feature suggestions?
so…. nothing yet?
Please Plex. I can’t imagine this would be a difficult feature to add at all, the perfect junior dev job!
Spent hours today and there doesn’t seem to be a way to delete the automatically generated low-quality posters. For custom uploads, ImageMaid seems to do the job. It should be such an easy feature that many requested, yet Plex is choosing to ignore it…
It’s difficult to take PLEX seriously with the lack of basic features, that have been requested by many, languishing here for over 10 years. WTF is even going on with the devs?
Just confirming this is still an issue (bump)
The functionality offered by Kometa’s ImageMaid should be built into Plex!
I’d like to add a concrete use case to this long-standing request, since it seems to have gotten more relevant with metadata management tools (Kometa, TMDb agent re-scans, etc.) that legitimately upload many poster revisions over time as part of normal overlay/badge workflows.
The problem: After running automated overlay tools (e.g. Kometa) across a library of 1,100+ movies and several hundred TV shows over a period of iterative testing, my Metadata folder accumulated 145,000+ orphaned poster versions across ~58 GB - all versions that are no longer selected/active, just sitting in each item’s Uploads/posters/ folder indefinitely.
Neither “Clean Bundles” nor “Empty Trash” (Settings > Troubleshooting) touch these - they only remove orphaned bundles for items no longer in the library, not orphaned poster versions for items that are still there.
There is currently no supported way to remove old versions at all - neither in bulk nor individually:
- The PlexAPI/REST API only exposes
selectPoster()(pick one) anddeletePoster()(reset the current one to default) - there’s no endpoint to delete an individual non-selected version from history. - The poster-picker UI (Edit > Poster) no longer offers any way to remove a stored version either - you can only select among existing versions, not delete any of them. Old custom/overlay versions just keep piling up indefinitely with every metadata refresh or poster upload.
Suggested feature: A button under Settings > Troubleshooting, alongside “Clean Bundles” and “Empty Trash” - something like “Clean Unused Posters” - that:
- Scans each library item
- Keeps only the currently selected poster/art/background per item
- Deletes all other stored versions from disk and the database reference
- Reports reclaimed space when done (similar to how Empty Trash reports removed items)
This would apply equally to posters, background art, and possibly clearLogos, since all three accumulate the same way.
Why this matters more now: with the growing popularity of metadata overlay tools (Kometa, etc.) that intentionally re-upload posters whenever a badge/overlay needs to be re-rendered, this issue compounds much faster than the “occasional manual poster change” scenario this thread originally described. A server with active overlay automation can realistically accumulate tens of GB of orphaned poster data within weeks.
+1 to this request, happy to provide further details/logs if useful for prioritization
Uh, why isn’t Kometa just managing these as local metadata assets? Uploading the new designs into the Plex metadata is the wrong way to manage this.
This sounds like a Kometa problem, not a Plex problem…
Plex is just laughable at this point. A 7 year old feature request that many have requested, has not even been looked at, only argued with “why should it be deleted” I don’t want all the options to be cached to my disk. I set one, never look at it again, it’s a waste of requests/downloading/stored disk space that will go unused.
you say it’s an issue with a third party app, but people are only forced to use them because plex refuses to add the features the community wants. Instead it’s adding more useless bloatware that makes the app near unusable today.
In the absence of anything useful from Plex, which is what we have all come to expect of such an arrogant organisation, have you used ImageMaid? It comes from the Kometa crew and can clean all unused images.
Sometimes, Plex doesn’t supply the correct poster for an obscure record album. Sometimes, I just want the wrong one gone! What’s difficult about that?
