I am an amateur with Plex overall despite having used it for years. I recently restructured my library on new hard drives and created all new libraries within PMS. My video files include posters within the metadata. With my previous Plex libraries when I would add a movie PMS would automatically display the movie poster as part of the icon. Some of the movies now appear with a cropped screenshot as the icon instead of a poster. The videos are definitely correctly matching with the agent DB as the posters are found available if I were to manually edit the file but PMS will not automatically assign them for some reason. I have cleared the cache, changed the priority of the metadata agents and tried to follow any other instruction from the various forum posts. I’m not sure what more I can do to get Plex to either recognize the posters in the file metadata or even from the match DB source. Any help is appreciated but please keep in mine any help will need to be dumbed down for me as I am not the most technically capable with these things.
If you’re using the Plex Movie agent then just disable the “Use local assets” option in the Advanced section when editing the library. Then “Refresh Metadata” for the affected items (or “Refresh All Metadata” at the library level depending how many items are affected).
We’re expecting any embedded artwork to be a poster, so maybe it’s also a good idea to remove the embedded artwork if you can (or don’t add it in the first place).
Thank you! By unselecting this and the ‘Prefer local metadata’ options my issue was fixed. I do find it counter-intuitive that be deselecting these options, PMS is now using the embedded posters from my original files as the artwork instead of the screenshots. It seems like it should be the reverse but maybe I am missing something. Thanks for the swift response.
“Use local assets” will use any local sidecar files first (e.g. if you have poster.jpg file inside the movie folder), if none of those are present then it will use any artwork embedded inside the media file itself (only for mp4 files).
“Prefer local metadata” will use any embedded metadata inside the media file first, including embedded artwork, titles, summaries, etc. It will then use any sidecar artwork too (e.g. poster.jpg).
Any metadata not pulled locally in these two scenarios will be sourced from the cloud.
You should never enable “Prefer local metadata” unless you know exactly what you’re doing. It is disabled by default for new libraries.
About this prioritization, though I clean my tags before sending the mkv to the library, sometimes a “title” is overlooked. So before disabling this option in my library, I just want to ask you a question:
Will the correct title (from Plex online metadata source) be displayed, but the attached subtitles still detected or they will be ignored too?
