Lock Posters

I can’t even count the hours it took me in the last years to correct manually selected posters that have been changed by Plex for an ugly and/or different language version of the cover.

It’s especially annoying for non-english users with non-english libraries like me that don’t use the default (e.g. english) posters because all the movies are in a different language and so are the posters. You upload a movie, you change the cover to a cover in the movies language, you come back a few days later and see an english cover with a totally different movie title again. You change it again. A few weeks or months later it’s reverted by Plex again…..

I have seen posters changing randomly when I do not manually change the default poster selected by Plex, but lately even manually selecting a poster it is randomly changed during a metadata update.

I do not want to disable the automatic metadata update, because I do want to receive updates to the other metadata but not the posters. I upvoted this feature.

Wow. Still no feed back from Plex. Apparently they give a sh.. about customers with their own libraries.

Of course, I have the same problem. I have posters embedded in the movie files themselves, a poster jpg in each movie folder, have chosen to use local assets, and still …

I might try to write a script to update movie posters from local assets. Any suggestions?

It’s unacceptable that this is STILL happening in 2025. What are we paying for if we can’t even get basic QoL features?

I don’t do it for all content, But a lot of my content has cover-1.jpg and fanart-1.jpg files added into the folders and the libraries are set to use local content if there is any.

I mostly do this for favorites and collections. I’ve even designed or edited some posters myself over the years.

In the past this poster art issue has caused problems when I migrate my media though.

I’ve sure there’s a better way to store this user selected artwork locally that allows for easy migration and protects it from unintended alteration.

Another year goes by and still this issue is not resolved.

I be sure to change EVERY poster to something else when it is newly added, sometimes changing it back, but still CHANGING it, and yet I still see the posters switch to something else at a later date.

The new thing too is that seasons can have different backgrounds than the main show.

The one being picked appears to be from the pool for the show itself, so if you change the background for the TV show, the season will use the original one. And yes, after doing the various “clear bundles”, “optimize”, and “empty trash”.

As a work around (and IMO just the better way of doing things) you can save posters as part of your library data. The Local Media Assets page for TV and Movies explains how best to structure it. Basically for any media I actually care about that’s not just a one off request I download a high quality poster set and save them in my library on disk, then the next metadata refresh it pulls the on disk poster instead of pulling from the awful public source.

Poster lock if you place them in the movie/tv show directories as separate files. I’ve been doing this for years now.

That’s not a fix. It’s the same workaround that’s already been described, which shouldn’t be necessary.

Understood, but the workaround isn’t too difficult with availability free tools.

Life isn’t perfect but in this case the solution isn’t hard to accomplish.

If you have like five things on your server, sure. Thousands of items that you’ve already spent hours selecting the perfect posters for, and now have to do that again (maybe even for the third or fourth time, and/or for items that aren’t wrong now but could be charged at any moment), with even more steps, because Plex can’t be bothered to respect their own settings?

It is, in fact, “too difficult” for me to fix a long known but unacknowledged bug on a service I pay for that is too busy adding features nobody asked for that degrade the quality of their original purpose to actually fix egregious outstanding problems.