I’ve just re-arranged all my movies and TV shows, shuffled folders about between my NAS and a new 8TB drive. In view of the big changes I decided to do a complete new Plex setup. I had backed up my Plex settings via the registry, and also deleted “%loacalappdata%\Plex Media Server” folder. I restored the settings after a new clean install.
I’ve seen a few other threads about this but why is Plex retrieving so many foreign movie posters when indexing content!? It definitely wasn’t like this on my previous setup. Eg: “The Light Between Oceans” 16 foreign posters, not one English!
Settings/Agents/Movies/Plex Movie has “Plex Movie” first and its settings have “Localized Titles” and “United Kingdom” set.
Settings/Agents/Movies/The Movie Database is set the same.
Indexing quite a lot of content I’m fed up of manually fetching posters from www.impawards.com
Is it not possible to specify a source for movie posters? And I know it’s been asked many times previously, I know you can move the Plex data folder “%loacalappdata%\Plex Media Server” but why does Plex store all these unwanted junk posters, sure I know you can just leave them there but can’t a poster be selected from a choice and the rest be not stored/used?
As has been discussed many many many times on this forum already this is a side effect of TMDB doing some sort of cleanup after their upgrade to their V5 version of their site. Its nothing to do with plex.
Best way to fix is to create an account on TMDB, login and then add the posters / backgrounds so help the community fix TMDB after their change.
Thank you. As also has been asked “many many many” times on this forum is there no other way to set a source for movie posters, and/or delete all the junk that Plex stores?
@OttoKerner might be worth someone from Plex posting some pinned notice in the annoucements regarding this as there is at least a couple of posts per day on this.
Also enable Fanart.TV
I don’t have the Cinematerial agent installed, but do have Farnart.TV and have not seen any odd posters to speak of. <—as it’s been enabled for years, but thought it never did much… until now. <— also wondered where all those really nice posters and backgrounds are coming from… until now.
Following my initial excitement at this being fixed by enabling Cinematerial and/or fanart.tv (and I dragged them up to first in the list), a clean setup has shown it makes little difference, Plex is still retrieving tons of junk posters “Hachi - A Dog’s Tale” 16 foreign language posters.
I guess it’s as dokuro posted and this is screwed for the time being. Have to settle for just editing lots of them manually via “choose an image” or “enter a url”. IMO the poster thing needs addressing and a “Delete All” function added, storing 16 unused posters for a movie seems very wasteful, possibly thousands of unused and un-needed files dependant on the amount of Films/TV added.
It leads to the question, don’t Plex developers have some sort of agreement with TMDB, if they rejigged their site and messed up Plex’s poster retrieval?
Thank you to those who offered suggestions anyway. Cheers.
I just indexed a Library of 8 movies, Plex has downloaded and stored 120 un-needed and unused posters! You can only shudder to think of the amount of needless data and files stored when folders of hundreds of movies and TV have been added! Not knocking it, but just an observation of something I’d never really taken note of before. Surely a “Select” rather than “Grab All” design would be better.
I think I misunderstood part of your question. Sorry about that!
No, TMDB didn’t give a forewarning to Plex – and they don’t have to.
It’s their data and if they are compelled by … circumstances to remove material from their site, then they can and will do it.
About the selective downloading: Plex cannot know which poster the user might end up selecting. Now that you have enabled the additional agents, you might end up with a lot of duplicates indeed. But there is no way to determine automatically which of these posters is superior. Particularly if the data source doesn’t tag them with the language or other metadata, like ‘this is the “clean” version’ or other useful information.
Just had a quick play with Emby (portable), it downloads one poster per movie, when you go into Edit you can Delete it and there are a row of other posters with a download arrow beneath them. Admittedly it didn’t find posters for all movies but that seems a better approach than Plex’s grab all method. However, I didn’t like Emby.
I’m not a software designer or a coder but I have to say this appears bad design, surely there’s a way to offer a choice and select it, thereby not storing thousands of un-needed and unused files, it’s sloppy.
As mentioned above, I got 120 unused and un-needed posters for 8 titles and I’m about to add hundreds of films! I’ve no doubt that ppl adding huge collections may have Gigs of unnecessary data/files, its very sloppy. Just an opinion, as mentioned I’d never really noticed this before. Can’t the developers implement some way to delete all the junk!?
Edit: How do you quote a post on this forum plz? Clicking “Reply” in the post you want to quote doesn’t seem to do it?
I don’t disagree. There should be ways to reduce the excessive amount of metadata.
The question is if the chiefs see it as an urgent measure to take or something that can be shoved into the backlog.
Marking/selecting the words or sentence you want to quote with your mouse is the most effective way. You will get a “Quote” button if you do so.
In Web app select the menu when you hover over library name. choose “Reorder”. The icons will change to three lines to the left of the library name which you can drag to reorder. ( not sure of you are referring to a different Player app.
Yes, I’m in google Chrome but I can’t get that to appear?
Referring to my earlier point about the huge amount of needless data stored, I’m just fixing some mismatches, and I’m now curious whether that and “Empty Trash” actually deletes the junk data or just hides it from the library?
Again, just an observation, but so far I’ve indexed 538 films, with hundreds more to add, and a lot of TV Series. So far “%localappdata%\Plex Media Server” folder is 2.24Gb consisting of 40,518 files in 13,652 folders!
Come on devs, plz sort this out, surely this should be the number one priority rather than adding features? How the database is built and compiled surely needs a complete redesign and re-code?
It’s madness to store so much un-needed data (poster wise), I assume that may also apply to the masses of other files and folders? I’m not talking about moving the data folder, just the huge amount of needless data that is stored. Decent software as it’s free, but in its present state personally I’d never pay for it.
