With regards to album art, if there are two options available to Plex, it always picks the lowest resolution option. And it looks atrocious on my 4K TV. I would like the exact opposite to happen. I would like Plex to automatically select the highest resolution album art. Or, at the very least, use the album art I’ve attached to the file, art that I’ve spent countless hours curating/improving. Plex: please fix asap.
Chris
You can configure Plex to use embedded or local tags and art.
Awesome. Thanks. I’ll see if that works.
But a suggestion for a feature for Plex engineers to noodle on: If there are two (or more) available pieces of album art available to Plex, it would be great have a setting of “always use the highest resolution image”. That way, I could turn all sources for album art on, and be rest assured I would be using the highest quality album art available to me.
With regard to album art that you’ve attached to your media files - The tools I’ve used to do that will take a high-resolution image provided by me, and scale it down to a much smaller image before embedding it into the .mp3 file, so what actually gets embedded is very low res, even though I fed it a high-res image. You might be better off not embedding the image, and leaving the hi-res image in the same folder as your media files, named album.jpg.
Thanks Beckfield. I simply use iTunes, which seems to preserve the high-quality art. When Apple upgraded their album art a while back, I had to upgrade the art on several albums, but I’ve been OK with new purchases. Plus, I’m lazy. It’s easier for me to just drag my iTunes folder over to my Plex Media folder.
I followed all the steps you’ve outlined. Now I just have to do the “Plex Dance”. Saving that for this weekend.
Another idea on potential features: when I click “edit” on an album, and look to change the poster art (album art), I’m presented with three or four potential options using the Web client. They almost always look identical to me, but one could be much higher resolution than another. It would be great to see the resolution of each option and its source (so then I could identify the source of low quality art. It might not always be someone else’s service. Might be me).
Your ideas should be entered as feature requests in the Feature Request Voting forum. Please read the guidelines before posting.
I have yet to add the feature request (I’ll do that soon). However, an update: looks like iTunes embeds a “small” jpg for use in thumbnails of files so you see the album art for a file on desktops instead of the generic Mp3 icon (or iTunes used to. Or some other service I bought MP3’s from did. Who knows). So, I flipped the order of the order of the services I wanted to pull album art from, putting local art last. This seems to improve the quality of art a bit. Maybe only 5% of my album art is now using the low res local thumbnail images (usually, obscure songs or albums where I had to hunt for art). I could buy the ID3 tag editor software and do some sort of batch remove of the thumbnails (similar to what you suggested earlier), but what a pain. So, the feature I’ll submit a request for is: “a setting to ignore low res album art thumbnails when importing album art” or something similar.
