Hi everyone,
I recently had to redo my entire Plex setup after changing most of my hardware. I tried to keep things as clean as possible by renaming my HDDs so they would keep the same drive letters for Plex, and I also moved my whole Plex database, which was several gigabytes.
However, after doing that, a lot of my movies were missing their posters, and I couldn’t even run a proper search for matches or posters anymore. After spending quite some time trying to fix it, I eventually decided to rebuild my whole library from scratch.
While rebuilding it, I noticed something strange: many movies that previously had 4K posters/covers — the ones with the small “4K” logo at the top — no longer seem to have those posters available. Some movies still have them, but only a handful.
For some movies, Plex shows more than 100 different posters available, but none of them include the 4K logo anymore.
Does anyone know what might be going on? Has Plex changed the way posters are fetched or displayed? Could this be related to copyright, metadata agents, or a change in the poster sources?
Thanks in advance for any help or explanation.
Did you move the Plex data folder onto a storage volume which is formatted with the NTFS file system?
If not, then you may lose posters any time.
Avoid any FAT, exFAT, ReFS (or pooled drives with a 3rd-party software) as mentioned here: [HowTo] An extended guide on how to move the Plex data folder on Windows
The same happens, if you first zip up the Plex data folder, before moving it to a new destination. The zip format cannot store the hard links of the NTFS file system, which are used to set the default/user-defined poster.
You may have used a 3rd-party software before, to create these.
that is not really the answer i am looking for, its like buying a burger and the saleman tell me i can find the bread in another shop…the question is why it seem 80 % of movie so far i look have NOT 4k poster anymore , if you don’t know its fine to say it, but its an interogation about why this is happening
The sites we get poster metadata from likely just don’t have them anymore.
how can i find them again, can i find the poster in my old plex data base that i still have ?
If you kept the entire Plex Media Server folder maybe but it would not be found easily since they would be buried deep in folders in bundle files that have no human readable names. You would need to check every file manually.
I opened a random bundle file to show you an example. These are posters for the movie Legend. To be clear I had no idea it was Legend til I opened one of them.
Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/somenumber/numbered.bundle file/contents/_combined/posters/tv.plex.agents.movie.randomnumbers
You are better off looking for ones you like online elsewhere IMO
One thing I also stumbled on completely by accident is that turning on my VPN, even with split tunneling enabled for Plex, seems to restrict the connection to the database that contains all the images/posters.
it doesn’t change the fact that i still can’t find any 4k ref that i could find before, but still it is a strange behavior
Because when the VPN is on, only the cover images that were already loaded/cached show up. When I click to check or choose other posters, nothing appears. So it seems Plex can still display cached images, but it cannot reach the online poster/artwork database anymore while the VPN is active.
this is the list of all the process i allow to not use the VPN
The last processes I added were Plex Transcoder and EasyAudioEncoder, but that is all the “Plex” processes I can find. So it looks like there is something else running that does not show up as Plex, and it does not like the VPN.
any ideas ?
Ok, concerning the posters, I may be a bit closer to understanding what happened.
It seems that my old library was set to French for my parents, so Plex was accessing the French poster database. From what I can see, Plex can only access one poster language/database at a time, and it does not seem possible to search posters from all languages at once.
It also looks like the French database has more posters with the 4K mention at the top than the English version.
I am now pretty sure that Plex connects to The Movie Database to get the posters:
For example, I checked Back to the Future with English posters here:
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/105-back-to-the-future/images/posters?image_language=en&language=en-US
Then I switched to the French posters, and I was able to find the version with the 4K label at the top:
https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/7T9dKyRcfZsKrrIQdofrPySWtHD.jpg
To be honest, I didn’t even notice at first that the title was in French, because the font is very similar.
So the conclusion seems simple: Plex only checks one poster language/database at a time. Maybe an option to search posters across all languages would be useful?
ps :
And this also brings me back to a suggestion I made a few months ago: please make the poster selection window bigger. It is almost impossible to properly choose a poster when the thumbnails and text are so tiny.
They are basically the size of a postage stamp.
Now, a question for those who know better:
Can I switch the library language to French to access and select those posters, then switch it back to English without losing all the posters I already selected?
The last time I tried changing the library language, when I first switched it to French, Plex changed a few posters and titles to the French versions.
This will only work temporarily.
Your best strategy is to acquire the poster motive that you prefer as a graphic file. Then put it beside your video file and enable “Use local assets” in the library properties.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220677-local-media-assets-movies/
This indicates, that DNS resolution doesn’t properly work when your VPN is active.
i just needed to add all process to tunneling for the vpn, its ok now
