Ability to lock posters the same way you can lock other fields. Regardless of the official statement posters do change.
I’ve searched multiple posts on here and reddit where people experience the same issue but regardless posters do sometimes change.
I’ve read "When you manually select a poster it is automatically flagged as locked in the Plex server database. "… but many many people have experienced this change, it definetely happens.
I don’t know why out of all the fields that you can lock you can’t lock Posters. I hear that people get around this using a meta media manager and then using local agent… this is a lot of work and steps to solve what is/could be a bug.
A lock would be a nice easy fix or otherwise a bug fix would be better.
Still surprised there’s no way to lock Posters or Backgrounds.
Changing the image manually isn’t a permanent solution as it often “unlocks”.
This wouldn’t be an issue if you cold actually see the locked status when editing an item.
And also- STOP using some rando horrible source for posters! What you had worked. This is only an issue because Plex changed the source of posters from a reputable source to some poorly curated, horrific source. I absolutely hate what Plex is doing. Just… stop breaking as many things as you “fix”.
I have just noticed that dozens of posters in my library have changed recently. Some of the new posters are sort of ok, but I still prefer the old posters. A lot of the new posters are HORRIBLE. They are covered in ugly text that you can’t even read given the size posters are displayed at. Random text with actors names, review blurbs, studio names, etc.
I know I haven’t manually updated the posters for all of the titles that were changed before, but I definitely have manually updated some of them and they still change.
An option to lock the posters would be fine, but there needs to be some kind of general option to automatically lock all the posters and prevent them from being automatically updated. When I add a title to my library I just sort of subconsciously notice whether the poster is good or not. If it’s bad I fix it. If it’s good I leave it be. I shouldn’t have to manually lock every new title’s poster when I know for a fact I don’t want ANY of them to be automatically updated EVER.
It is so annoying to have the posters constantly change to some ugly bullshit on their own! It is so time consuming to fix. Anytime I scroll through my library I always find at least one random poster that is now f***** up that I have to go fix. Please fix this!
I am having to change about 60% of my Posters as they have now been swapped with incorrect background images (that are somehow listed under Posters).
My 22 year old son is autistic & unable to read or write - so he relies on the images to choose his movies.
Having used Plex since 2008, I have never seen this issue before.
I have started to change hundreds of movie posters, but don’t want to have to do this again.
Will the images be automatically locked once I change them?
This problem seems to be getting infuriatingly worse.
I can confirm that even manually selecting and saving a poster doesn’t work to “lock” it. (if it ever did.) I watch, and a week later it’ll still be randomly changed to some weird, poor, or confusing new image.
constantly fighting for my library to make sense and look nice is driving me mad, and every option to change where and how this metadata is picked up, creates more work, or gets flagged as needing “upgrade”, or is just as likely to get depreciated or changed again.
Please give users an option to not EVER update a poster (or background) if an existing one has been selected.
I’d like to note the irony that if you upload a poster to a title (like with the drag and drop or “enter a URL” option) you cannot delete the poster image from the server, but at the same time Plex does not allow you to keep posters from being changed.
So you can have it all look like that within the XML for anything that can be randomly changed upon refresh.
What is missing is this:
<Field locked="1" name="thumb"/>
If ‘Thumb’ isn’t locked, then the item can be altered by a refresh.
Not sure why it’s tied to ‘thumb’ and not ‘art’, but it looks to be the one consistency across any of the items that have had their covers changed.
This would all be helped if there was an easy ‘lock’ option though on the user-side. Being told it’s not an issue is beyond frustrating as this this has been requested repeatedly for years.
Just a follow up on this issue? either add a lock on posters/backgrounds or add a feature on the edit page to remove some of the unwanted images on posters and backgrounds. Thank you in advance for a quick and positive response.
I don’t mean to be rude, but this is such an unnecessary and enraging issue. Every time I scroll through my movie library there is poster art that has randomly changed. I have spent hours of my life customizing my library to look just how I like it, only to have it randomly change and have to spend hours more doing monotonous repetitive work.
HOW IS THERE STILL NOT A FIX FOR THIS!?!? IT HAS BEEN YEARS!!!
I do not want my posters updated, EVER! It’s helpful that a poster is automatically chosen when you add an item to your library. It’s convenient not to have to manually find posters yourself for every item. If it’s a good poster, I will leave it alone and then it should stay the way it is. If it’s a bad poster, I will change it to a better option, and then it should also stay that way. How is this so complicated???
Honestly, this should be the default behavior. Who is out here asking for their posters to be randomly updated? They are movie posters. They shouldn’t change after release. Posters are iconic images that are symbolically intertwined with their respective films. Why would you want a film to be represented by an entirely new image (often times a very low quality image with random unecessary text) that you are completely unfamiliar with?
But even if you somehow believe this insanity makes sense and is preferred by most users, could we, pretty please, get a setting to make it stop for those of us that hate it? Given the outcry, it seems like many people would find this useful. We have been asking for YEARS. Why is this just being ignored and dismissed?
I’m making a script to fix another long-missing Plex feature: the ability to hide spoilers (thumbnails, summaries and titles). Summaries and titles work great, but when I hide and lock a “thumb” field, the image returns the next time the item is refreshed. The other locked fields do not return on a refresh unless unlocked, exactly as one would expect.
Please remove (or at least allow us to disable) the feature that updates cover art. This is a complete aggravation.
Turning off all metadata refreshing is not an optimal solution as reviews, etc will not be updated.
There is no legit reason this cannot be disabled (or even exist at all) once a poster is selected, it should remain intact, once we change it, leave it be (it still alters it no matter what, could be a bug)
PLEASE get rid of this, I have no idea who would want this but if plex devs think its a good featuer at least have it disabled by default and a clear setting to change under libraries to enable / disable it.
This is by far the worst feature i have ever seen plex implement and my biggest complaint about the function of a plex server
Just spent a half-hour fixing a bunch of movie posters that Plex randomly changed on me. This doesn’t seem like an issue that should take four years to solve…
