Hi
I noticed that my movies posters change from time to time. Even after iI selected a different poster, after X days / weeks, my movie poster have changed again. Not all of them, but several.
I suppose this is some setting somewhere, could someone point me out where I have to change this.
Once I have selected a movie poster, I like it to stay with this specific poster
Thanks in advance
Latest DSM 7
Latest PMS
I’ve only seen this happening if the selected poster has been removed from the respective source (e.g. some license/legal takedown). Otherwise Plex should stick with the poster you’ve selected.
I also have this problem. About a year ago I spent a full Saturday going through all 2.5k of my movies changing the poster to the one I identify with most or picture in my mind when i think of a movie. However, over the the course of the last year almost 50% of the posters have changed from what i manually selected to a different one. It doesnt seem like this has happened all at once but over time. There has even been times when i noticed a poster change then put it back to my preference and a month later i see it changed again. It has been driving me crazy but i havent had time to look into it. Ive stopped fixing them because its been a futile battle.
Id also love to know how to make them stop changing!
ps its def not a legal thing as the posters i want to use are the main ones and still there to change back
It is indeed a very frustrating battle I also gave up. But still would love to find a solution to it.
I have both of these turned off in scheduled tasks and I don’t see my posters changing:
Refresh local metadata every three days
Refresh library metadata periodically
Typically I notice this if the poster match went with “default” and the default changed at the source (like TheMovieDB).
Essentially, if I manually select a poster it sticks. If I just leave it with the auto-matched default poster, if that default poster changes then it’ll update my poster after the scheduled task for updating runs. If I manually pick a poster - particularly if I upload my own - it won’t change. This seems to be true for movies and TV shows.
I’ve actually tested it with TheMovieDB and instead of manually updating my poster, I uploaded new posters to TMDB and then voted them up and after they became the new defaults at TMDB, a few days later my Plex updated with them as well. It was a less popular and not much maintained movie\show so one vote was enough to change it. 
Same holds true for background images it seems too.
So if I care about the poster changing I make a point of manually selecting one or adding my own manually.
At least that’s been my experience the last few years and how I’ve handled it.
I do have both of those unchecked in scheduled tasks but maybe i will try turning others off in there like “Perform extensive media analysis during maintenance” and see if that helps
That may just be the case with 95% of them that changed on me. Thinking back If the poster was already what I wanted I may have just let it be, Ill have to go back trough them and actually select the one i want even if its already the default… However there have definitely been a few that this was not the case. Ive selected a poster with the 4k uhd bar at the top that later changed to one without and one that just caught my eye was Jackie chans first police story when i changed it was an orange poster i didnt lke, i changed it to the one hes hanging off the side of a bus. yesterday i noticed it had changed to a close up if his face.
Also thanks for the tmdb info, I didnt know you can vote on the posters!
I think sometimes they get swapped\replaced at the source and that can throw things off or I’ve had bad metadata refreshes or bugs just kill the poster entirely too (defaults to frame capture) so no matter how well you manage it, you definitely can still get some poster errors.
Also, because of how Plex caches some of the source info for metadata (to help with API calls and to merge data across sources) it can take a couple days for changes at the source or in the cache to come through to your Plex client so sometime errors can persist for a bit even after being fixed.
Other than if a bug hits, I can’t recall ever having a poster that I set manually - by uploading my own via Plex GUI or using the matching file name in same folder method - change on me randomly so if you really have a particular poster in mind it’s best to set your own directly. At least in my experience and I’ve seen Plex reps\employees recommend that too.
I do that for movie collections and TV Shows a lot using ThePosterDB to get nice and consistent cover posters (particularly for TV seasons).
I keep PlexDash on my phone and if I notice a poster or background changed to something I don’t like while navigating from my TV client (my usual location), I use that app to update it pretty easily right then.
You also shouldn’t get any textless posters as default either - those are pretty popular in some circles (particularly folks who use Jellyfin or Emby with overlay plugins) - but that sometimes depends on the poster being tagged correctly at the source so can pop-up sometimes but usually gets fixed eventually on the next pass.
TheMovieDB votes are pretty low on lots of stuff so it doesn’t take many to change the default on some shows\movies - if they didn’t lock it - so that’s another way you can kinda help keep a favorite poster on your content.
If you’re getting a LOT of changed posters there might be something up with the DB and running the PlexDBRepair tool from Plex server dev\engineer ChuckPa might help? I’m actually not sure how much it can help with posters but it can fix and clean-up the DB so certainly doesn’t hurt.
Just some observations and experiences managing posters over the years…
I came here looking for an answer to this, and I’m sad that there isn’t one… it happens to me too, and it drives me crazy… on top of it all, when it changes the posters, always seems to select the most awful/generic/Netflix like/boring posters it can find… if the system HAS to change the posters, because the selected one isn’t available anymore, at least it could select the closest one in appearance…
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