I appreciate the change. If nothing else, it gives my libraries a slightly different look.
Itâs mostly about preferences and that canât ever line up for everyone, so for many, like yourself, itâs probably better or no concern. Iâve seen some posters and artwork that was solid as well but having to create adjustments and new steps to manage my local media server going forward because of the change is a bit frustrating.
It also feels like more and more community based involvement and control has been lost as well:
Which is a factor of the business choices involved but for some long time customers and contributors to Plexâs foundations - speaking for myself anyways - these situations can be discouraging for various reasons.
Iâd also like a better way to report bad or incorrect artwork besides âpost in our forumsâ; ninjas or staff being expected to address artwork reports - that will likely be subjective - will have itâs own various issues. Plus, Gracenote has content partners so they canât just flip artwork around because a Plex user reports something. So, users will likely be told âokay, itâll be submittedâ and then to go set our own artwork⊠problem resolved. And I wouldnât blame them.
I recommended in another post that a specific intake for these things might work well and maybe thatâll come along in the future; Plex support is eventually going to have to manage helping paying content âownersâ eventually and posting to forums is not likely to cut it for paying VOD customer support.
So artwork using Fred Savage riding a horse for Deadpool 2 or the animated Hobbit using the top of a poster badly cropped or actors so far on the edge theyâre lost in the overscan so all you get is part of a face with mostly an auto-filled background color will be things that happen. None of that is necessarily âwrongâ either - not functionally, just subjectively - but not what Iâd call right either.
If I want to be cynical, I could assume Plex leaders are leveraging their âcommunityâ to clean artwork up for them for free before the VOD services are released. That also fits a model that isnât uncommon.
Anyway, it is minor overall but itâs another minor thing added to others as Plex local media server gets more fiddly cumbersomeness (thatâs a word, really) in response to the new business model features. Itâs just disappointing and a bit frustrating and Iâm slow to learn that itâs probably not worth this effort or participation in hopes it might improve some of these things - but itâs a hard habit to break.
I do appreciate BigWheel giving us the details they could here.
Here is a script to select all the default TMDB posters.
8 Likes
This is fantastic in the most horrible way possible
If this isnât some kind of prank, that person needs to have their photoshop license revoked
TMDB problem. Iâve already reported it and waiting on them to delete the spam poster â Reported Problem for Johnny Mnemonic - Discuss Johnny Mnemonic â The Movie Database (TMDB)
3 Likes
@BigWheel do you know if there are any plans of switching to Gracenote for TV shows as well, whether it is soon or in the future?
We will in the future but I do not have a timeframe to share.
1 Like
Thank you this looks great.
Unfortunately getting this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/opt/appdata/scripts/select_tmdb_poster.py", line 69, in <module>
select_tmdb_poster(library)
File "/opt/appdata/scripts/select_tmdb_poster.py", line 52, in select_tmdb_poster
if item.isLocked('thumb'):
File "/home/media/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/plexapi/base.py", line 516, in __getattribute__
value = super(PlexPartialObject, self).__getattribute__(attr)
AttributeError: 'Movie' object has no attribute 'isLocked'``Your version of PlexAPI is out-of-date.
I have been running this script daily for about a week - havenât noticed this issue.
Just checked it again on iOS app for a couple of movies that had their posters changed last night.
I did wonder why my artwork started to be become crappy.
The whole reason I picked plex in the first place was the fact it used a known good source for artwork and now this?
Great 
I guess Iâll have to manually set the several thousand items in my library now then.
So much for automation being good!
Is there a method to the madness for plexâs new artwork provider choosing what poster is forced on our library when we do a metadata refresh?
Why does plex not choose the first poster in the option available? Avengers(2012) is the 6th option available. The way all of the Avengers films were changed to the worst possible choice means there is a coding decision for this - randomly choosing all of these at the same time would not be possible.
This new âchoosingâ from plex is worse than the automatically generated netflix generated posters.
1 Like
TMDB posters are sorted to the top (then IMDB, TVDB, and FanartTV) and Gracenote posters are sorted to the bottom. Plex selects the first Gracenote poster. Itâs not random.
3 Likes
It would be amazing to show this in the UI of plex or written anywhere. Then again, non-revenue activities have stopped completely so this isnât a surprise.
There have been many stupid changes made by the plex team and Iâm used to having more bloat and less functionality every update but this has to be, by far, the worst change you have ever implemented.
1 Like
Plex hasnât said this publicly, but it is my speculation that the change is due to legal reasons.
Over that past year, Plex has been receiving a lot of DMCA takedown requests for posters (you can search the Forums for these) causing posters to go completely missing/blank. My guess is Plex made the decision to properly license posters from Gracenote instead of using TMDB so they can solve this legal issue. Afterall, it is better to display some poster instead of having a blank poster, even if that poster is not the âbestâ one.
If I am correct, then this change is here to stay and we all just have to live with it. We can still change the posters ourselves. Plex hasnât taken away that ability and there are plenty of other options to choose from. You can still select a poster from TMDB and you can automate it with my script posted above.
6 Likes
Is your script intended to select TMDBâs default posters for existing items? Or is it meant to have newly added items use TMDBâs default posters after scraping? Will the script affect posters that have already been manually selected? Because while I also want to maintain TMDBâs posters, Iâve manually chosen many posters before, and I donât want to change the ones Iâve already selected.
The script runs on existing media in your library. It selects the first TMDB poster from the options available (and falls back to the first poster if no TMDB poster is available).
You can trigger the script to run when new media is added with something like Tautulli (see the script for setup) or schedule it to run with cron or similar.
The script skips locked posters by default (manually selecting a poster locks it), but has the option to changed locked posters as well.
2 Likes
Okay, got it. Thanks for the script!
