Server Version#: 1.20.3.3483
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.46.2
Hello. Many of the movies that I add to Plex default to a poster that is a long horizontal image, and then when that movie’s thumbnail is shown in the client app (any really) the movie thumbnail looks pretty bad because it’s a cropped view of that image.
When I go to edit the poster on that movie, there is always a perfect, vertical one that is the second choice in there. Changing to the vertical one fixes my issue.
But this is very tedious to do for dozens of movies. Is there a way to tell plex to prefer vertical posters? Is this maybe a misconfiguration I have somewhere?
Sure.
The first photo (looks like the forum uploaded it as the bottom photo) shows the long horizontal image, cropped, as the thumbnail.
The second shows the poster edit window, and the long horizontal image selected. The vertical poster immediately to the right is what I would have wanted plex to choose.
I see this exact patterns on many of my movies. Sometimes the crop includes like half a face or something and it looks pretty poor. I think I just have something misconfigured somewhere that it is choosing the wrong poster format.
That image is correct. Plex expects a poster so if it sees one that is the wrong ratio, it crops to the correct size. The problem is that I don’t know where that image is coming from. I don’t see it when I match that movie. So it’s either coming from an embedded image in the file or you have that image as a file along side your movie file.
To add - it appears this is coming from metadata? When I look at the poster option edit screen, and look at the key value in the html - the vertical poster comes from “image.tmdb.org” and then the horizontal poster comes from “metadata://posters/”.
Is that metadata location coming from the mp4 file?
I was just looking at the agents, and I find the UI a bit confusing in terms of how “Movies” appears to have 4 different, overlapping categories (Personal Media, Plex Movie (Legacy), Plex Movie, The Movie Database).
How do these 4 categories interact with each other? Which one provides the data for posters? Or what is the order of priority? Left to right?
For what it’s worth - I did make sure to move “Local Media Assets” to the bottom (checked) of all 4 agent categories. Then I refreshed all metadata - but didn’t see any change.
When creating a movie library you pick the default agent that will be used. You can override individual movies when doing a manual match, otherwise it uses the default one. You can see the default by editing the library. You see the one used specifically for a movie by looking into the XML and checking the name included in the “guid” field.
Those agent settings control the order in which data is retrieved. Changing them does not affect already matched movies. To change, you’ll need to do the Plex Dance.
SOLVED! It was due to settings from the Plex Movie agent upgrade.
I’m still relatively new to Plex, and must have upgraded my Movie library from the old Plex Movie agent to the new one without understanding the fine print.
