I’m seeing a repeat problem with actor images disappearing (blank black circle, no initials). It’s not just one or two shows. I can play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with it practically. Find one show with a missing cast image, scroll down to one of the related show hubs below, pick a show and many times find a different person missing on this second show’s row.
I normally spots these missing images while browsing on my FireOS/Android TV devices, and if I go to the web interface I normally find the actor’s image is also missing on the show there as well, but not always. The info seems to be stale in some way regardless, because I found I could correct the problem by refreshing metadata on the show. After a few days playing whack-a-mole with titles showing the issue I just went ahead and did a full refresh on the entire library (annoying as I now had to go correct posters and backdrops that had changed).
A week or so later I started to see series with the same issue. Last night I again did a full refresh on the entire library. It has been less than 24 hours since then and I’m once more finding titles with missing cast pictures. The most recent one:
And now if I exit out of the app and go back in on my Fire Stick the cast is showing with the new photo (which looks like an older photo really) for Masato Sakai.
This isn’t the first time I have noticed the “updated” picture seems to be an older picture, too.
Tomokazu Sugita is 44 years old now. I recognize this picture from a long time back. But a few years ago I started seeing a more recent headshot of him (as seen on TMDB) on my server:
Why is Plex reverting to older pictures for actors and why is the server losing images at all at this rate?
Edit: Jun Fukuyama’s photo has also been changed to an earlier one than I remember (of course he’s good at looking younger)
Looks like they are going with licensed images for cast photos now like they do for posters and background images. Unfortunately server owners can’t pick other images for casts like we can with posters and background and some of these licensed photo are definitely worse than what was being currated at TMDB.
I’ve noticed it too on lots of movies shortly after they made this change as i had a TON of blank actor images (they’d be there in the discover profile but not on the movie listing). If you looked at the same movie at watch.plex.tv you’d see it missing there too so it’s Plex DB being empty\broken for it, not the server. I spent a few hours trying to fix it before finding those threads on Plex forums and checking watch.plex (which I have to do more often now since so much data is tied to that now). My picture for Anthony Stewart Head is currently missing from Gotham by Gaslight and it’s missing from watch.plex as well:
So that shows me it’s Plex’s metadb that’s missing it and not my server having an issue. No way to fix it other than to wait and run a meta refresh manually in a couple days because the maintenance refresh rarely picks these up (though it was quick to remove them). Those several missing cast photos I had were missing for over a week after this change impacted my server. I went ahead and ran the refresh manually and most images popped in but these one-offs still happen. I agree with those other posts about it that many of the licensed photos are not what I’d consider good choices.
Overall it’s not a huge functionality deal but it is an aspect that was rock solid for years and crowd sourced so admins could semi-manage it by uploading, fixing and voting on cast images at TMDB but now it’s controlled by Plex’s streaming service so just not ideally handled for us local media folks.
Still having this happen and still seems a manual refresh on the library is the only way to fix it. It’d be nice if some of the maintenance tasks could be adjusted to pull these.
Still having to manually refresh metadata on a library to fix cast pictures that have been removed by Plex but don’t update with the new picture. This time it was Samuel L. Jackson if that helps folks pick it out.
If the cast picture still uses TMDB that seems to update fine if it changes so it looks like it is only a problem when it’s a cast picture using Plex’s new licensed cast images. It’s removing the image for DMCA - as I understand it - but not replacing it with the new one. That feels like a line or two of code could address it either during the update process or in a maintenance schedule.
Edit: Just a little extra annoyed about it because I just ran a manual refresh to fix Discover not picking up a cast member listing, which happens regularly now it seems - and that got fixed (and might have during regular maintenance schedule but I saw it so ran refresh to see if that would fix it) - and then today saw the cast picture missing so had to run it again because whatever Plex uses to trigger removing cast photos likely ran last night. It takes only a few moment to run it but it’s annoying that I haven’t had to use that manually refresh metadata function in years and now I do.
Missing Alec Guinness’s picture now. I’ve refreshed metadata manually and it’s still not updating; other cast photos that were missing updated but not this one.
I’d really, really like updating cast photos to be added to the regular maintenance tasks if it’s not going to be part of the process that removes these cast photos in the first place.
That has nothing to do with it. I have automatic refreshes off and I’m losing cast pictures occasionally. Refreshing the metadata is how I bring them back but the new pictures are worse than the originals sometimes.
