I’m not a Plex wiz but I’ve encountered the following problem over the years: album art within Plex suddenly disappears. I use Plex on a Windows device. When I go to the original Windows File Explorer folder containing the album, the art is replaced by files that are now named “folder.jpg”. These files are always exactly 200 x 200 pixels. In addition, much of the art becomes hidden files and Plex loses it.
I thought all of this was caused by Plex or iTunes. I was wrong. I’m pretty sure it’s Windows Media Player. This is a known issue with Windows Media Player—but since there are relatively few Plex users compared to Windows Media Player users, there isn’t much available online about this issue vis a vis Plex.
Suffice to say that Windows Media Player renames album art with the name folder.jpg and replaces these files with similar smaller files of the same name, folder.jpg. All of these files are exactly 200 x 200 pixels. Quite often, the files become hidden files. You can’t see them in the File Explorer album folders.
You can make the folder.jpg files reappear in File Explorer by opening the folder, choosing options and checking “view hidden files.” It’s still a problem because when the files reappear, the folder.jpg files that reappear are compressed to 200 x 200 pixels. Again, it’s Windows Media Player that is known to do this.
The only solution I’ve found is to rename every single album art file named folder.jpg to pretty much any other name. Also, it’s key to uninstall Windows Media Player before it happens again.
Every time I get a Windows Update, the first thing I’m going to do is uninstall Windows Media Player. Also, I’m going to save my music collection every few months and I won’t delete the old copies for maybe six months. In other words, assuming I do this every few months, I’ll have three or four old versions before I delete them. This way, if it ever happens again, I can go back to find a copy with the album art intact. I will also keep several copies of Plex just in case. I’ll also keep several copies of the Plex Registry Key.
Plex should tell Windows Users to uninstall Windows Media Player before setting up a Music library. I’m not sure if the tech folks at Plex are even aware of this.
One improvement I’ve noticed is that while the folder.jpg files are hidden, Plex backs up a better version. In contrast to a few years ago when this first happened, Plex will keep your original album art somewhere. You can open an album within Plex and you’ll find your old art available. Even though this is an improvement, the problem is that while Plex might have a copy of your original album art, File Explorer won’t have it. Which means you are locked into using Plex forever.
Unless you think Plex will be around in thirty years, it’s a bad move to have Plex in control of your album art without your being able to see it within File Explorer. So you’re better off getting the original art and changing the names of the files from folder.jpg to anything else–before some Windows update reinstalls Windows Media Player without your realizing it.
One word about uninstalling Windows Media Player. It is a tricky endeavor because “Add Remove Programs” doesn’t work for Windows Media Player. Instead, you have to go to Start/Settings/Apps/Apps and Features. Then you have to choose “Optional Features.” At that point, you can scroll to find Windows Media Player and uninstall it.
Good luck. It took me two years to figure this out.
