How does Plex pick album art exactly?

[odwulf]

Hello,

I’m trying to organize a big music library with Plex. My library uses all the default settings, on an up to date server. I’m trying to do things properly (I even went as far as to contribute to MusicBrainz so my rare albums can be matched if moved to another library).

I find the info that says that with the latest auto-matching, art is taken primarily from online source. But how does it work for albums that cannot be matched (say personal mixtapes or concerts recordings)? I cannot find the documentation that says “a file named cover.jpg in the folder”, or a file named folder.png, or anything.

I know it reads the images embedded in the files, but how does it chose if there are several? I have albums with front and back covers, leaflets pages, etc. All correctly tagged. I was expecting Plex to pick the front cover, or maybe just the first image it finds, but it seems to be compeltely random.

Is there any way I can prepare my files and folders so that the correct artwork will be picked if I copy the folder to another library? Without removing all embedded images but one?

[beckfield]

Some of this depends on the setting in your library. There is an option in the library editor where you can select ‘Plex Music Only’ (online sources), ‘Local Files Only,’ or a mix of both. When the ‘Both…’ option is selected, the order of precedence is:

1. Local artwork files (folder.jpg, etc.)
2. Embedded tags and images
3. Online sources

If no art is found at the first step, it moves to the next (local external files are prioritized over embedded images because embedded images tend to be lower resolution).

This How-To article has more complete information:

[HowTo] Configure Plex to use embedded metadata (music)

Please only reply to this thread with corrections or questions about the information in this How-To article itself. If you want to report a bug or ask a question about Plex and metadata, please post it in the appropriate forum, where it will have the best chance of being seen. This guide applies to libraries using the "Plex Music" agent only. Plex essentially has two ways to identify your albums: Folder/filename structure – If your files don’t have embedded metadata, or it isn’t accurate, o…

[odwulf]

Thanks for the help. Is there somewhere a resource a bit more detailed than “folder.jpg, etc.”? The documentation has quite thorough explanations about external media assets for movies and series, but I failed to find anything similar for music libraries.

[beckfield]

I’ve noticed that documentation missing, too. Just the other day I wrote up a proposal and posted it for review.

I’m hoping for review/verification from Plex staff, so please don’t take it as completely accurate yet.

[odwulf]

I really, really appreciate your efforts for the community. And I got further thanks to them.

I put files names album.png, cover.png, default.png, folder.png, poster.png, etc. in an album folder, and it was still picking randomly one of the embedded pictures for the album covert art, despite most files being of a bigger size than the embedded art.

Then I converted copied them all as .jpg and… it did the trick. By order of priority, I have:

1. album.jpg
2. poster.jpg
3. folder.jpg
4. randomly picked embedded art
5. any other jpg
6. any other png

I did not try other formats, but there’s a clear preference for jpeg here. Still, there is way too much randomness here.

Everything else seems to work according to your documentation proposal (and BTW, shouldn’t the artist-background.jpg icon be a file one?) Is there any way to push it?

[beckfield]

@odwulf

BTW, shouldn’t the artist-background.jpg icon be a file one?

Sharp eye! Took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to, but I found it. Yeah, I created that structure with dummy files just to make that screenshot, and I apparently made that one a folder instead of a file. I fixed it.