Posters for my personal media are in portrait and due to a recent Plex update, they are now being displayed as cropped images in landscape, which is really annoying. I agree that having a library option to choose the aspect ratio will be the perfect solution to satisfy every user.
4 Likes
Any way we can get some feedback on this? My collection is pretty much impossible to browse on the Plex app on my tv due to this inconsistency. Can we at least have it be consistent?
2 Likes
So the new âModern Lookâ or whatever change was made on the tv apps fixed this. However, the Windows client is still showing them with the forced landscape aspect ratio.
+1 for this feature! Would love to have this feature when browsing an audiobook library (going with a 10:16 or 2:3 layout would look better than a square look)
I updated to the latest version of Plex and now have this issue on my PC which is soooo frustrating⊠However I see that in collections, my posters are still the correct aspect ratio - so If you are willing to tag all your videos and then access them via collections, this could be a work-around of sorts.
Hi! Have you figure out how to display art/poster in portrait instead it crop as pictures as Landscape?
Hi all!
I have some questions:
My (Home) Videos Agent are set as Personal Media.
I have for each video a poster.jpg, but when Plex scan them, they show as crop in Landscape from a portrait art? Does anyone know how to fix this so it show as Portrait and not crop as Landscape?
No but my workaround solution for the time being is to create a new library as Movies and re-import the personal video folder. Judging that this thread was created in 2015 and no response from Plex employee (except one that pretty much acknowledges the issue), I doubt if weâll ever see the fix/enhancement 
Thx for reply PlexUser2020!
I was about to do the same thing as you, but I hate to retyping all information on each Video again. But itâs a good ide to make a new section for those Home videos and make it as a Movie section, on that way all video files will have portrait as art.
Adding the entire content of a recent post here because apparently @anon18523487 doesnât like us starting a new topic because itâs been flat out ignored for years. Itâs more convenient for Plex employees to let this languish somewhere they donât have to see it, I guess.
This is an old issue, with a Feature Request dating back to 2015, and it seems itâs just being ignored, so itâs time to start fresh and report this anew.
For some reason, when viewing media in an âOther Videoâ library, the posters display correctly (portrait) inside of collections, but when viewing the library instead of collections, their aspect ratio is automatically changed so they are cropped and ruined.
Why is the same library displaying posters two different ways? This seems like an obvious bug if itâs behaving differently in two different locations within the same library.
Solution 1 (quickest): Just go back to portrait everywhere since that is the default in collections.
Solution 2 (preferred): Add a simple configuration that lets you set the aspect ratio per library, e.g. âOther Videoâ defaults to landscape but in setting up the library I can select portrait instead. Then when the library is displayed you just access that single config variable to toggle the display.
As a principal level software engineer with over a decade of experience, I know this is not a huge undertaking. Youâre already storing a âLibraryâ object of some type which contains other configurable variables like selecting a metadata agent (and indeed the poster URLs and such). Thereâs obviously some sort of display variable that sets the display dimensions and then auto-crops the posters in the incorrect aspect ratioâŠyou just slot in that property to swap between sets of dimensions, simple.
I would literally do this for you in a few hours tops if this were an open source project I could access, and thatâs even taking into consideration that itâs a repo Iâm not familiar with in perhaps not one of my stronger languagesâŠone of your devs should really be able to make such a superficial cosmetic change in a few minutes, so I donât know why this has been dragging on for years.
This seems to be a pervasive bug in all sorts of platforms and versions of both server and player, so Iâm not providing those details as it is not a quirk of a specific configuration.
I really hope maybe this time you can find 20 minutes to fix this really simple display bug that is quite infuriating to (paying) users like me who spent a lot of time curating custom video libraries only for all of those posters to be useless.
5 Likes
So glad I followed your advice, @anon18523487. You guys are just SO responsive to these feature requests, no wonder you wanted us confining this to this one outdated post instead of starting a new thread.
Do you have ANY plans to ever address this? Or is the plan to just continue ignoring your users until we get frustrated enough to give up and stop giving you money for this service.
Plex does not comment on the status of Feature Requests. Keeping all requests to 1 thread allows collecting all the votes in 1 place instead of spreading them around. This allows Plex to gauge user interest and to help prioritize what to work on. With 31 votes, this requests is not going to get the prioritization you are looking for.
First of all, prioritization consists of more than just the number of votes. One major aspect of it is also the effort required, and as @baronvonvaderham explained, this change is trivial. You cannot compare this to something like Google Home integration (which I assume is much more complex), no matter how many more votes it has than this.
Secondly, this âfeature requestâ has been open since 2015, but has now actually become a bug report, as soon as different plex clients (and even different views within the same client) started using different aspect ratios, effectively breaking the list view for everybody.
It is therefore much more urgent to implement a per-library setting where we can select the aspect ratio we want now than it was in 2015 when this âfeature requestâ was first opened.
I canât state enough how utterly lazy and pointless @anon18523487âs response is here. Iâve been doing development like this for a decade, if youâre prioritizing things based solely on forum votes, your entire project management system must be hilariously stupid. You gauge priority by three factors (if youâre competent developers): Impact, urgency, and level of effort.
This hits two of the three criteria hard: All users are impacted and you have a non-uniform experience across different clients (very bad, makes you look incompetent). The effort involved to fix this bug is nearly trivial. Youâre not introducing new display options, youâre simply adding a single selector per library (trivial) and then your display template needs a simple logic branch to choose the aspect ratio based on that selectorâs value (mostly trivial, but slightly more work than capturing the preference value, but is really just extending what you ALREADY DO to display posters differently based on the type of library, really you just need to swap out the value that dictates the conditional display branches from something like âmy_library.type_of_libraryâ to âmy_library.aspect_ratioâ.
Itâs such a trivial fix I donât even need to see the exact code to get 90% of the way there. It could be in a language I donât know and Iâd wager a pile of money Iâd have it solved in 2 hours or less with zero context (not counting any dumb quirks of your testing and deployment pipelines, based on how you donât seem to understand basic project management and user feedback industry best practices, I have zero confidence you even know what CI/CD is let alone implement it properly).
The fact that youâd rather expend the effort arguing about how this âwonât get the prioritization you wantâ rather than score an easy win fixing a bug people have been unhappy with for seven years sums up how much you at plex actually care about your paying customers.
But keep prioritizing things like Tidal, âDiscoverâ (when most of us are using plex because we DONâT want to subscribe to 40 different services), live tv no one asked for and that PlutoTV (free) does better, âfreeâ movies and shows for pass subscribers (that, again, no one asked for).
Itâs a classic startup death spiral, in my experience: Youâre desperately pumping out half-assed âfeaturesâ so you can A) Write it off as an âinvestmentâ in the business on your taxes, and B) Try to squeeze out a few more new subscribers with gimmicks while you donât just ignore your existing unhappy customers reporting problems with your platform but you actively tell us you have no intention of ever addressing even the most trivial piece of tech debt plaguing this platform. Hell youâre even doing this at the expense of existing features we actually say we want (looking at your incomprehensible decision to cut podcast support)!
If youâre not going to fix such a simple thing, fine. But stop pretending youâre doing it for any reason other than laziness and not actually giving half a crap about your customer feedback. I used to think, âIf only the pay was good Iâd love to go work on Plex and contribute to this.â Now Iâm absolutely sure working there would be the definition of hell if a dev canât even get the time for a quick win like this as a palate cleanser between tougher projects, that youâre happy to let bugs languish unaddressed for years. I hope the devs there all the luck in finding a more competent team on the next step in their career.
Also @jurem hit on my biggest point here perfectly: This is not a feature request, this is a BUG in your platform. Are you really going to continue ignoring a bug weâve been reporting for months or years as an ongoing problem?
1 Like
I expect that most of your users chose PLEX because they wanted to manage their libraries in the first place (I could be wrong - but this is my expectation).
This is really not a feature request - this is really the most annoying bug across all platforms. You are presenting that you have plenty of supported platforms but these platforms have inconsistencies. Specifically in terms of poster layouts.
Very very please - fix this ASAP. I donât care what will be the way. But something that will help.
solve this by
- Put the possibility of Select the aspect ratio in the library settings
or - align between platforms what asset will be used for specific layout - portrait poster for portrait layout and banner or background for landscape layouts BUT not a poster for landscape somewhere - then on another platform there will be background assets and on the other platforms will be something else (my preferred way - because you donât need to go think very much about your inconsistencies between platforms but only you will set better assets for a specific layout orientation - then you can fix all inconsistencies)
2 Likes
Agreed that the larger issue (BUG) here is personal videos and their collections are not displayed consistently across the platform, or even consistently in the same places on different devices. Thereâs no way to make the images look good in both places.
Landscape views:
- Media within server-generated collections, e.g. ârecently addedâ
- Media within Home and Recommended views of server-generated collections
- Library media
- Collection posters on my Samsung TV
Portrait views:
- Media within user-generated collections
- Media within Home and Recommended views of user-generated collections
- Related media on detail page, e.g. âmore with ___â
- Collection posters on other TVs, browsers, or mobile
*Note that this issue is also occurring for collections of individual episodes â they are displayed in portrait orientation within collections, but landscape everywhere else.
I posted here about this issue back in April 2021 and since then I bite the bullet to recreate my entire personal video library (i.e. > 1100 videos) as âMoviesâ and carefully âunmatchâ and manually entered the metadata for every single file. That project took me a few days to complete and everything looked great with cover art displayed correctly in portrait mode like they used to be prior to April 2021. However, things started to break again a few weeks ago that sometimes when adding new videos to the library, the server would ignore the âunmatchedâ status of each file and re-download/re-sync metadata for ALL files from scratch, and as a result, the custom metadata in all videos were erased and replaced with incorrect data. This issue doesnât happen every time I add videos, but it has happened at least three times in the past few weeks, each time in the middle of me manually re-entering the metadata for the 1000âs files. If adding an option to select the cover art aspect ratio is too âdifficultâ, how about give us an option to effectively stop the re-sync of metadata on âunmatchedâ videos, especially when that video already has custom metadata? (I have already checked the âUse local assetsâ and âPrefer local metadataâ in my library when that happened.)
Also, the other thing that I observed is that when the entire library gets metadata re-sync, it will mess up the âDate addedâ attribute and the videos will no longer display in the correct date-added order (in addition to losing all custom metadata).
I have been using personal videos for a while now for quite a large library of mine. The reason being scraping the correct metadata in this case is not possible, so I add my own poster and general info etc. At least this way I know it wont get overwritten âaccidentlyâ at some point if an agent for movie library typ for example decided to overwrite all this personal data!
I have been hoping for a server feature, as requested in this thread, to allow the server owner to set the poster orientation for a personal videos library as there is most certainly a requirement for this. Surely this wouldnt be difficult to display the server selected orientation for that library in connected clients!
It seems that a recent update has made this library type even worse as the posters are no longer displayed at all!
PLEASE address this issue
1 Like
