I have a rather large television library. I had video thumbnails turned off on that library for the last 5 years but recently got a 2TB NVMe drive and decided to turn them on for a better user experience. I set it up as a schedule task and also made sure video preview was turned on within the library. After doing this I never noticed Plex working on generating the thumbnails so I waited a few extra days. Still nothing. I searched my plex installation folder for *.jpeg and sorted by date. Plex is generating other images but not video preview thumbnails. After finding some previous advice on this forum, I ended up doing the plex dance, deleted the previews with the “Delete Preview Thumbnails” button, toggled on and off all settings, checked all settings, restarted the machine, this solved nothing. I also can’t force the thumbnails to generate by clicking Analyze on the show, it just doesn’t start anything, even after refreshing metadata.
I have been able to get the thumbnails to generate when I add new shows. I can also analyze each episode and it will work but I can’t analyze a whole show or season. I need Plex to retroactively generate video preview thumbnails for all my existing shows. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time curating my metadata and media so re-adding all the shows isn’t an option for me.
How can I get this to work? I’ve included screenshots of my settings as well as my logs. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Switch your library view to episodes and use multiselect to select episodes in bulk, then analyze them at once. It gets tedious/infeasible with large libraries though because multiselect breaks if you scroll too fast and cause Plex to skip rendering a chunk of episodes.
As far as I know, this is the only way to manually create series thumbnails - analyze each episode individually.
When I have a lot of episodes in a season (series) I wish to Analyze, I go to my TV Library and select All, Episodes, Sort by Show - then I scroll to that series, select the first episode (using the Shift Key) and select the last (all episodes) and select Analyze.
I usually will do all the series that begins with “A” - allow that to finish, then select the "B"s etc. - I will even sometimes select 300-400 episodes, do those, wait, and then select and Analyze the next 400 until they are complete.
