Plexignore not working for photo libaray

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.18.9.2578-513b381af
Player Version#: multiple (android, desktop, roku, all latest afaik)

I’ve found multiple closed threads about this issue, which was supposedly resolved already (at least for Windows server). However, I am not able to get this to work at all so far.

I have a photo library. Each album is in its own folder. There may be mixed photos and video clips in a given folder. This all works very well! The problem is that I want to specify a cover image, instead of letting Plex randomly generate one. I would like to keep this image with the rest of the photos, in case I have to set things up again, which historically I definitely will.

In each directory I’ve added a file called _cover.jpg

At the library root, I’ve added a plain text file named .plexignore containing the following:

# ignore cover images for metadata
_cover.jpg

I have also tried with _cover.*

The underscore is important so the file floats to the top of directory listings. I don’t want to do something like *cover* in .plexignore because it could return false positives. I would prefer not to add an entire subdirectory to each dir for this one file, not sure if that would help but throwing it out there now.

After adding these _cover.jpg files and rescanning the library, they display (across platforms) despite being ignored. incidentally, Plex also sorts underscore AFTER numbers, which does not match MacOS behavior, not sure if that’s some other fs convention but makes this problem even worse as the _cover image in Plex doesn’t even float to the top.

I have tried removing files, rescanning, adding them back in, rescanning, etc. I can see the cover images disappear from the library, and then show right back up after I put them back.

Any ideas what I’m doing wrong? Or how I can get this working? I’m open to other ideas for how to accomplish this, but I don’t want to keep the cover photos in a different location, they need to be in the same folder as the albums they’re associated with. And according to everything I’ve read, I can’t see any reason this shouldn’t work exactly as I’ve set it up.

Halp?!

Thanks :slight_smile:

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Your description of the location and contents of the .plexignore looks right.

The one thing I can think of is probably something you’ve already checked, but is it possible the .plexignore file has an extension that is not being displayed? I don’t know of Mac OS does this, but it’s a problem on Windows.

Other than that, I got nuthin’.

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Thanks, yeah I did check that. MacOS definitely messes this up initially (if using something like TextEdit, which I did). I posted this after correcting for that.

I haven’t had much time to come back to this but today or tomorrow I’ll try some more things:

  • Try using a “real” text editor instead of TextEdit (thinking maybe file encoding, line endings or something? Spitballing here…) - BTW I did make sure this was plain text and not RTF, that would also probably matter.
  • Try without leading underscore on _cover.jpg, and maybe with a couple different filenames (in case underscores or the word “cover” are somehow reserved or cause issues)
  • Try with a subdirectory, in case directories are treated differently (deliberately or otherwise)
  • Try with a photo-only directory, and maybe a photo-only library (maybe the presence of videos is confusing something?)
  • Yell “oh come on” a few more times at it

That’s where I’m currently at. I’ll report back when I’ve tried more things.

Thanks!

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