I’ve recently finished up a project to add album art to all my ripped CDs. All tracks have embedded front cover art work and album directories have either a cover.jpg or a cover.png.
When viewing an artists page on the Plex web front end some albums show the correct artwork. (Either from the embedded art or the album directory file, I’m not sure which.) Others use the artist image for all the albums on the artist page.
When playing my collection with the Random Play feature on the Plex Channel on my Roku once again some tracks show the correct album art while others don’t show any album art all.
How does Plax select album art to display on the Web front end and the Roku Channel?
With the Roku Channel, it seems as if tracks that had art work prior to me first using Plex have art work when played on the channel. Tracks that recently had art work added to them don’t. I’ve tried rescanning my music library in Plex several times but that hasn’t helped.
It depends on how you have Plex configured. If your embedded/local tags and cover art are all in good shape, and you want Plex to use them in preference to the online databases, take a look at this How-To. It explains how to make sure Plex prefers your local metadata. It also explains the order of preference Plex uses for artwork.
I’ve read your How-To and I had everything set correctly. I’m guessing the reason Plex still didn’t show my art is because I needed to do the Plex Dance? And the Plex Dance is necessary because Plex does not read updated metadata after the initial loading of a library?
That is very possibly the reason, and yes, that’s why the Dance is sometimes necessary. Try it with one or two albums before you do your whole library.
HI- I am new to Plex, and trying to understand how ALBUM ART is being determined. I have spent years meticulously tagging my mp3’s for other applications. My file structure is standard, and I have all the artwork for CDs stored locally. In each album directories, I have a mix of files: cover_f.jpg, cover_b.jpg, cover.jpg, folder.jpg, etc, and all of my mp3s have embedded covers. I have run multiple tests, and I cannot figure out which file plex picks for the cover. Some are correct, some use the cover_b.jpg, etc. It honestly seems like it is random.
I have read about the order of precedence for agents (local, etc). But I cannot figure out which file Plex will definitively use for the album coverart. Can someone point me in the right direction? i.e. “if cover.jpg” exists in the album directory, plex will use that! (I have tried cover.jpg, with inconsistent results)
After much testing, here is what I believe is happening:
If I have “Use embedded tags” checked, the album art will be determined from the embedded art within a song itself… some of the time. I personally have verified this.
This would be great if it did this all the time, BUT Plex sometimes picks (at random) any jpg that is in the same album directory, regardless of if you have a file named cover.jpg in the album directory. This is true even if there is art embedded in the song. It seems like any file containing “cover*” may get used. And this is even with the songs properly tagged with embedded images.
Does anyone know the algorithm, or order of precedence in how the covers are determined?
I just read beckfield’s sticky, in which is says that image files in the folder take precedence over embedded images in songs… but which specific filename is you have several image filed?
I’ve found a python configuration file which contains the following:
ALBUM_POSTER_FILES = [‘album’,‘poster’,‘default’,‘cover’,‘folder’,‘img_’]
My assumption is that these partial filenames are used in some form of REGEX- and the “cover” may be returning more than one match (my directories have cover_f, cover_b, cover_full, etc…). I was able to modify this file with successful results.
I’m having an issue with Plex somehow grabbing a photo that I took off of my file server and using it as cover art. The weird thing is I never used this photo for any of my songs ever
I was recently forced to rescan my entire music library. And with several updates to Plex, I find the coverart determination is just like it was a year ago- Plex will not reliably use covers that are tagged within the song files. So it then looks in the album directory, and seems to randomly pick a .jpg.
Specifically, it appears to sometimes choose the “cover_b.jpg” file, instead of the correct “cover_f.jpg” file.
Am I missing something? Is there no place to dictate the following:
If a cover is embedded into a song on the album, USE IT.
IF NOT (1), use the “cover_f.jpg” file in the directory
I neither (1) or (2) exist., use a “no_cover.jpg” file.
I am actually wondering about this myself, wondering if someone has figured out any more information. I have started the tedious process of fixing my music library (thankfully I did this a few years back as well), but either-way its a long process. The Plex dance should not matter to what I am about to mention as my example will be with a new album added. Everything I am doing is outside of Plex to new music before Plex even sees it, below is my full set of steps:
Example: Benighted - Carnivore Sublime (2014)
Get album art using Album Art Downloader (kudos to this AWESOME program). Save to the local folder as folder.jpg/.png (this folder structure is Music\Benighted\Carnivore Sublime (2014)
Taking my FLAC files into MusicBrainz Picard to get proper tagging.
MusicBrainz Picard cleans up the tags and recognizes + adds the folder.jpg/.png file and embeds it into the FLAC files.
Verify its embedded with another software called MP3Tag.
So now I have fully tagged FLAC files and a folder.jpg/.png file of the same image in a folder structure like:
-Music
–Artist
—Album (YYYY)
----## - Title.flac
----folder.jpg/.png
Yet it doesn’t load the tagged file or the local jpg/png. It uses its own. My agent under Plex Premium has local assets #1 on the list.
Hi, are there any new informations about this behaviour?
I have the same issue. Plex uses randomly “cover.jpg”-files instead of the embedded cover in the mp3-file.
I have this issue as well. I have some problematic folders that are like gregmez has and some that have following structure:
–Album
----Scans
------image1.jpg
------image2.jpg and so on
----Track01.flac
----Track02.flac and so on
----Folder.jpg
And it never uses the Folder.jpg but something from the Scans folder. File size doesn’t matter, image dimensions doesn’t matter, it’s just random image from there. Very annoying.
My investigation lead to the following discoveries:
There are multiple ways for Plex to pick up covers that can be controlled by the agent priority and settings. For example if embedded tags is selected Plex will pick up the embedded covers.
Independently of 1, however it managed to pick up covers, if Plex picked up multiple covers for an album, it will randomly choose one. I think it chooses the first one but the order is random. For example, sometimes it chooses the label cover, sometimes the front cover and other times the waveform (fish).
1 and 2 are independent, so Plex may be correctly picking up your embedded covers but incorrectly choosing which one from those to use.
I’ve devised a solution that works for my particular problem - making sure it uses the front embedded cover from my (Beatport-purchased) MP3 files. It can potentially be extended to serve other use cases like “Always use cover.jpg from the album’s dir”. Here’s the source if anyone wishes to extend it to serve their purposes: https://github.com/lightrush/update-plex-music-album-covers
