Hi,
I keep returning to my Plex library to find movie posters randomly updating over time. Where in the Plex settings can I stop new posters from suddenly replacing existing posters?
- use local posters
- manually set one of the online posters… this should lock the poster and prevent it from changing (unless that particular poster is removed from the online repository, e.g. for legal/copyright reasons)
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I use both.
But every few weeks, yet another film has randomly changed posters. I’m tired of this happening.
I don’t want to manually select the CURRENT poster among a hundred movies. I want a simple, boolean option to stop replacing posters with a carousel of randomly updating posters altogether. Whatever poster I get at the time of import into the Plex library, should remain indefinitely, until I decide to use another poster. Not this junk where Plex decides to completely change the look of 20-30% of my movies on a blue Tuesday.
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This issue isn’t just posters. It will change albums (names, cover and all), it will delete track artists that I’ve gone through and manually added. It’s really frustrating. We fill in missing data or set fields the way we want them and Plex undoes our time consuming work. And like all things that support personal media (their true niche), they’ll ignore our needs. Instead, they seem to be focused on external media sources that none of us that built a media server desire. They add it and I turn it all off or at least unpin that crap. Given the long history, you can be nearly certain, we WILL be ignored.
There was a recent change in the default movie poster art provider to Gracenote instead of primarily TMDB and that’s probably what you saw impacting large number of your posters recently.
You can check some of the linked threads there for some details and solutions to help clean it up - someone posted a script you can run to set all posters to the TMDB default for example.
It was kinda annoying to go back through and fix artwork after that change but if you weren’t setting artwork manually already it always had a potential to change from TMDB user votes on poster artwork; which wasn’t often really. This change with art providers was more dramatic because of it’s sweeping changes (some good, some bad).
What tom80H says is really the only way to “lock” artwork though. Either use local artwork or manually select something and it will stick otherwise it uses the “default” and whatever poster occupies that default slot. At least that’s how I think about it.
There’s ways to automate the local artwork stuff using scripts or apps; Dokuro has a pretty robust system if you look around for their posts. FileBot is what many people like to use.
I have about 1000 titles and I mix and match “locking” artwork and not worrying about it - I only get particular about marketing copy or actor names which Gracenote has a LOT of and TMDB\TVDB never allowed so that was most of my “fixing”. I often use PlexDash on my phone to do quick fixes when I notice artwork is off when browsing from TV interface and it’s particularly useful for going through background art in a library conveniently (you can set artwork browsing to the background image and quickly change it that way) - which is what I did recently after that Gracenote change.
Anyways - thought that might help with the artwork stuff. The changes can be annoying, but in the past it was an advantage when artwork was less quality controlled to get the “good” poster when it updated but now it’s a little different and Plex is handling it very different so maybe the local artwork stuff is the best option for more control if relying on Plex for quality is less reliable.
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Ah, interesting root cause. That’s important context behind this misbehavior.
If we’re going to override existing posters, then a prompt would have been a more polite way to implement it. Fine grained controls for which posters to update would have been particularly useful, for example show a menu:
- Option to update all posters
- Option to update per-library
- Option to update per-collection
- Option to keep existing posters [only newly imported library videos will receive new posters].
Either the first or the last option should be the default menu selection.
Closing the prompt should behave like the last option, and reshow the prompt the next time the Plex client application launches.
In fact, I probably would have opted into new posters across the board. The lack of notice of such a drastic visual change for video navigation was really jarring to spring on my libraries. I use the pictures to rapidly identify where I am in my libraries, so changing them destroys the map that I’ve built up over a long time.
Under “Scheduled Tasks”, disable “Refresh library metadata periodically”.
This ensures that nothing changes in your libraries. (unless you are triggering the refresh wantonly)
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Oh?
What other kinds of metadata does that include, aside from posters?
Pretty much all of them.
This was very annoying. Thanks for the advice so it doesn’t happen again, @OttoKerner.
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It’s pretty annoying that even after all this time, there’s still no method to lock posters or background art.
I’ve even tried manually selecting for every item and it still can get changed on a whim.
Preventing MetaData from refreshing also isn’t a great option as there’s other metadata that should be regularly refreshed. If I could tell it to not affect the posters, then I would.
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https://support.plex.tv/articles/201553286-scheduled-tasks/
" Refresh metadata periodically
Over the course of the month, the server will refresh the metadata for musical artists and TV shows in your library. This will help ensure that your artists have good tour date information (if you’ve enabled that feature) and that Plex Pass users of music libraries will automatically get new lyrics from LyricFind (if that’s enabled), for instance.
Note: This metadata refreshing currently only occurs for music and TV libraries (assuming the library is on the latest metadata agent)."
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