Moved drives now missing cover art.

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Hi,

I recently consolidated some shows on one drive and I noticed that the cover art was missing on a number of them. I have tried to run a metarefresh and even match the show(s) over again but still some of them don’t appear. I have also tried removing the cache and letting it rebuild but still no dice. Plex Version 1.7.3.3937. What is also strange is that shows that once had pictures are now disappearing too. I seem to be missing a lot of season covers too. The odd thing is that I can manually replace them by filling in either URL links or images but it kind of defeats the purpose.

Thanks in advance.

2

Log Files Please:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200250417-Plex-Media-Server-Log-Files
Drag zip file to message window and drop it.

3

@JuiceWSA Log files as requested.

Thanks for the reply

4

What’s probably happening is that when you move Libraries around - unless you take some precautions - Plex is going to, at least, want to rematch that stuff. If your names are out of whack they won’t match… not now.

What you should have done is not ‘Move’, but ‘Copy’ the old library contents to it’s new location, then create a new Library with that same stuff in it. Plex sees that both libraries have identical stuff and shares the old stuff with the new stuff. Once that’s all done you delete the old library.

The success rate on that process is up for debate when you use non-compliant file names and here’s why:

Mid 2016 Google yanked their horrific naming API that kicked in when horrific naming was encountered. You have some horrific naming. Lots of it. Your structure looks pretty good, but not so much for the naming. You’re also using MP4 files - I saw quite a few.

For instance:

I:\TV\TV Shows\ <----A TV Show Library - we hope the library isn’t ‘I:\TV’ - that would be bad.
…Nashville (2012)\ <— good
…Season 05\ <— good
…Nashville (2012).S05E01.The Wayfaring Stranger.mp4 <— not too good
…Nashville (2012) - S05E01 - Back in Baby’s Arms.mp4 <---- would be perfect

FileBot (link in my signature) can handle file naming for you automatically or manually in seconds.

What FileBot can’t do is remove possible embedded metadata in the Title Field of MP4/M4V files. Plex will read this info and prefer it over a perfect file name/structure (you don’t have any of those yet), but you can combat that situation by moving Local Media Assets to the bottom of every agent list you can find. All tabs in Shows and Movies here:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200241558-Agents
Just drag LMA to the bottom of the list and drop it. If you do have embedded metadata this will cure the issue, if you don’t it won’t matter. LMA will do what it has to from the bottom.

You have a fair amount of ‘wiggle room’ for naming and structuring in Movie Libraries, but virtually ZERO ‘wiggle room’ in TV Show Libraries. Best to stick with full compliance for TV Shows.

Renaming/restructuring is best performed OUTSIDE the library and you’ll need to write a new bundle for the show so The Plex Dance® was invented:

The Plex Dance®:

  1. remove show from library - the whole thing.
  2. update library
  3. empty trash
  4. clean bundles
    https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200392106-Library-Actions <— update library, empty trash, clean bundles
  5. bring names and structures into compliance
  6. replace corrected show into library
  7. update library

All Steps. In Order. No Shortcuts.

What you should do at this point is bring one show (pick one with the least amount of episodes) into compliance during a Plex Dance and see if it falls into line properly. If it does - good. You know what you have to do. If it doesn’t we’ll call in reinforcements to look deeper into the log files for something else, but you absolutely should bring all your TV Shows into full compliance or the Drama will never stop.

5

@JuiceWSA Thanks for taking time to answer. I’ll do the plex dance and clean it all up with FileBot (never used to but had been considering it). Then I’ll get my scripts to match the naming convention that FB uses. I really appreciate you taking the time to point me in the right direction.

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Do let us know if you still have problems. The likely issue is naming, but sometimes other things can go wrong.

All steps of The Plex Dance are very important. Do them all in the order they’re listed.

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@JuiceWSA Sorry just getting back from a 10 day trip and I wanted to set aside some time to do this. One of the things that I noticed, is that there is no clean bundles option now for libraries. What can I do to find that do that task so I can complete step 4 of the plex dance. I’m not worried about this, The Electric Slide has more steps and I can do that! :smiley:

Thanks

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Clean bundles is a server wide operation found by hovering over the word ‘Libraries’ in the left pane of Plexweb - under the dots.

9

I am having a similar problem to this guy and nobody is helping me lol. All my stuff is in compliance. I use filebot on everything. I have tried the plex dance multiple times and even completely uninstalled plex, removed all plex data from app data folder and started over and it is still only downloading cover art for about 2/3rds of my movies. TV shows it has no problem with. All other Metadata shows up fine and the movies are correctly matched. I even tried to dmz my server and turn off the firewall while telling it to refresh Metadata. Idk what else to do

10

I had a similar issue after migrating my libraries to a new server. Some cover art was showing up, but others were not. Using the “Refresh Metadata” feature on those shows and movies when viewing Plex through my web browser seems to have done the trick!