I have noticed that over time as Plex updates metadata, it sometimes removes existing metadata that is good quality posters and does not replace those posters or background, etc with anything. The result is a screenshot as the poster or background. Why does it remove metadata like that? I’m an old movie guy, so this happens with old movies.
Someone has bought the intellectual property rights of these old poster artworks.
That someone sends take-down requests to TheMovieDB.
If it vanishes from there, Plex cannot offer it anymore as well.
As soon as you Refresh Metadata on the movie (does also happen during nightly server maintenance, if selected), the previously selected poster is now no longer available and is replaced by either a screnshot or a different poster.
Thanks Otto. Yeah, I just made the mistake of doing a “update metadata” and i lost another couple of movie posters. So, the right move then is to get the library set and then prevent any metadata changes, like take the server off-line maybe?, and use it as protected stand-alone system.
Very sad. The industry is as stupid as the day is long! Think about this - I was FORCED into the black market to search for media that was over 20 years old because it was not legally avail anywhwere in high def… how stupid is that!!!
The music industry learned it’s lesson the hard way a long time ago - charge a reasonable price for a quality product and people would rather be legal and pay for it. But the movie industry still thinks that being buttheads is the answer.
And OF COURSE I did not acquire any of THAT media!! Heaven forbid! I was just investigating!
BTW… I thought of an idea that could work around the legal issue - buy a legit copy of the media that’s only legally avail in SD then get the HD version from the dark web. One could at least say they were trying to be legal.
So if I uncheck all boxes that refer to updating metadata, will that stop it from happening ever? And if I go out and find the metdata myself that was removed and point the poster to, say, a jpeg on the server, will those stay, or will Plex remove them? Thanks.
Thats why I don’t trust PLEX and scrap my own Movies and TV shows with Posters that Stay in my folders!
At least it’s good to know that manually installed posters will stay. And you really can’t blame Plex because they open themselves to being sued if they don’t comply. The bad guys are the movie studios, and of course, the moronic people that’ve turned suing each other into a billion dollar business.
You should be good after disabling " Refresh metadata periodically".
And of course remember not to trigger Refresh Metadata manually either.
But if you store the right poster motive as a file with your movie, you don’t need to care about that.
Just never use the “upload poster” method in Plex. Always place the poster file beside the video file.
The file naming rules are documented in here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/your-media/
You will need to enable “Use local assets” and “Prefer local metadata” in the properties of your library.
But the latter may also bring the contents of embedded “Title” meta tags to the fore.
So, if you go that route, make sure to always check for (and remove if necessary) any tag spam.
Good news is that this applies only to MP4 files, not to MKV. You can use e.g. Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...) for this task.
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