While scanning my library for a movie that I may want to watch again I have noticed, for quite some time now (over the last few versions), that the poster I had selected for the movie, shown in the Library, had changed. As I generally watch via the Plex app for the Roku, I have to access the server in order to restore the poster of my choice. Not having access to perform that task from the Roku is not the issue - the issue is “why is the poster changing on the server”?
If you had the default poster selected, that can change. From where Plex gets posters, the default will be the most popular one. If that changes and another poster becomes the most popular, the poster when change when you update your metadata. To avoid that, you’ll need to lock the poster, which is done by actively changing the poster. If you like the default one, you’ll need to change it to something else, then back.
I couldn’t find one of the old threads I remember dealt with this issue of changing movie posters and was about to post a new thread when I saw this one. I keep being annoyed by Plex’s habit of changing posters whenever it feels like it, which seems to happen regardless of whether I had previously “locked” the poster choice by selecting custom posters or not. Based on the earlier thread and some of the support documents, I have begun putting copies of the desired posters (where I have them) as files called “poster.jpg” alongside the main movie file in the main movie folders. However, despite having enabled using local assets and done all the other things I have found references to, I still haven’t found a way to make Plex actually use these local poster files, even if I manually refresh the metadata after adding the poster.jpg file to the relevant folder. The only way I’ve been able to get Plex to display the embedded poster file is to do the Plex Dance, but there’s no way doing that for thousands of movies makes any sense at all.
Is there any way to actually make Plex use these local poster.jpg files without having to do the dance on every one? I have about 2,000 of these poster files ready to add (I’d previously assigned these posters to the movies when I originally added the movies, using the “choose an image” method from within Plex, long before I saw the recent posts advising not to use that method, but that wasn’t stopping Plex from randomly changing those posters from time to time).
Hmmm - sounds interesting, but somewhat dangerous as well. So if I understand that post correctly, I could figure out how to run a script and unlock all the posters in my movie library, and then run a metadata refresh on the entire movie library, and this would make Plex start using the ~2,000 posters I would have manually embedded alongside the movie files. But then what happens to the other ~4,000 movies in the library for which I do not have the poster files and instead chose them from the list of posters Plex offered up when I originally added the movies? Does Plex then just willy-nilly change hundreds or thousands of them back to whatever it considers the “default” poster choice?
I don’t have exact figures for this, but I’d estimate that I probably changed/selected different posters for about 1/2 of my movies in Plex, so in order to try to lock in 2,000 it looks like I would probably also cause about 2,000 others to become unhinged and have to be manually re-selected. Hardly seems worth it.
Is there not some simple way to tell Plex just to leave my poster selections alone and never change any of them? If for some reason Plex loses access to display a particular selected poster (which I guess is what is causing all this poster changing in the first place?), could it not just replace the missing poster with a standardized placeholder that would make it obvious what had happened so it would be easier to spot ones that need replacing? As it is now it’s just this constant drip, drip, drip of stumbling across pictures that “don’t look right/like I remembered” while scrolling through the library and having to check and see if that’s really the right poster.
Alternatively, would it be possible somehow to let users download the posters selected from the choices presented by Plex so we could then embed them locally with the movie files and not have to put up with the constant aggravation of having our posters changed without our control?
If for some reason Plex loses access to display a particular selected poster, . . . could it not just replace the missing poster with a standardized placeholder that would make it obvious what had happened so it would be easier to spot ones that need replacing?
The Plex does not “lose access to display a particular selected poster”. As I stated before, I generally watch via the Plex app for the Roku. The Roku has the ability to access a Plex server on your local (home) network even if your internet connection is down. (Nice). So, even without internet access the Roku still displays the selected poster each movie. That means that the poster is not being downloaded each time it needs to be displayed but is actually stored in the Plex server database. SO, if the poster resides in the Plex server database it should be a simple change to the software to allow the poster to be locked to the currently selected poster or unlocked to change to the “most popular one” just as the other metadata on the “General” page of the “Edit” dialog box can be locked to your edited/entered metadata or left unlocked to change whenever the metadata is refreshed.
You could change the query and use thumb.locked=1 instead, to change all poster selections to “locked” state. i.e. as if you had selected a poster manually on each item.
However, the usefulness of this is limited – particularly when you change the metadata agent afterwards. Because a different metadata agent might also provide a different list of posters to choose from. Locking the poster won’t preserve the poster which was delivered by the previously used metadata agent – simply because it might not be available anymore.
I don’t understand why, if the poster has been “locked”, that a change to the metadata agent would override the lock and replace the poster “delivered by the previously used metadata agent”. Why doesn’t “locked” mean “locked”?
It was this last part of the above statement you quoted that got me thinking that somehow Plex might be losing access to some of the selected posters, but as you point out above the fact that Plex can and does display the posters when accessed offline (while the Internet connection is down) does seem to imply that the posters must be being stored locally in the PMS database, which does really seem to call into question why a user-selected poster should ever be changed by Plex unless the user manually chooses to do so. The current state of affairs would seem to be the result of some rather odd, user-unfriendly design flaw in the programming that I would hope the dev team would consider fixing sometime soon.
