It appears that Plex uses two different naming conventions for posters and fanart when using local media assets to pull artwork.
Posters is simply poster.ext whereas fanart is moviename-fanart.ext. What is the logic of having two different naming conventions in this instance? Why not be consistent?
My specific reason for asking is that I am using Plex for media library management but I still prefer the interface of Kodi and therefore use PlexKodiConnect. But I also use Ember Media Manager (EMM) to write nfos and control artwork, especially the latter. For example, foreign language movies, I definitely prefer the poster to have the name in the language of the movie generally speaking. When EMM downloads and names the poster and fanart filename, it does so using the moviename-artworktype.ext naming convention for both poster and fanart, e.g. Avatar (2009)-poster.jpg and Avatar (2009)-fanart.jpg. I don’t think EMM has the ability to name the files in 2 different ways but I’m checking on their forum. But it does strike me as odd that Plex wants 2 different naming conventions for local artwork instead of using one consistently…
I’ve been using poster.jpg and fanart.jpg for years as local artwork for all my media and they work perfectly. If you want you can use Avatar (2009)-poster.jpg and Avatar (2009)-fanart.jpg but I’ve always chosen the simpler naming myself.
Ahha! Yep, my bad, you can indeed use the poster.ext or fanart.ext. I missed that in the article regarding fanart but for poster only poster.ext seems to work…
So when adding a new movie and refreshing metadata, Plex pulls the movie info, certification, actors, etc, from the nfo and the fanart created by EMM however I always have to add the poster manually, which is frustrating.
Again, it seems odd that Plex allows 2 filenaming conventions for fanart but not poster. It would make sense to me to be consistent and either allow both naming conventions or only one…
Pretty sure that is not correct. Only matching ids from imdb, tmdb or tvdb are pulled from nfo to my knowledge. But I’m open to correction on that as I don’t use nfo files myself.
I also may be wrong but when using the agent “XBMCnfoMoviesImporter”, it takes the plot, certification, etc from the nfo. I think it also takes the actors as well but I might be wrong. I have the actors set as “link” and in the nfo is the URL to the actor’s picture on IMDB.
Anyway, slightly side-tracking from the original aim of this thread pointing out the inconsistency in the naming convention of posters vs filename.
On that note, I am sure when I first started using Plex, it was pulling both the poster and fanart using moviename-poster.ext and moviename-fanart.ext but after one of the updates it stopped working…
I quote from XBMCnfoMoviesImporter’s github wiki page:
is an agent to import the local metadata XBMC creates when you export your library to separate files. Movie poster and fanart will be recognized, if they are saved alongside your movie in the movies folder. XBMC naming conventions apply.
So if uses XBMC naming conventions which I am and have for years, it should pick up the posters…
I am about to rebuild the Plex library having moved all data to a new NAS and will be installing PMS on that NAS. I, therefore, need to quickly resolve this issue. When I built the initial PMS, this issue did not exist so I can only assume a Plex update has interfered with how this was working.
My setup is that all the posters and fanart have the same name as the movie file with “-poster” or “-fanart”. And I use the XMBCnfoMoviesImporter as my agent.
If there is any information I can supply to help solve this issue, please let me know.
OK so I am going to continue to rant to myself seeing as there are no replies to this in case it helps someone else in the future.
I rebuilt a brand new PMS on my new NAS and used the XBMCnfoMoviesImporter. I ensured that the “Disable local media support for artwork, trailers and subtitles (use local media assets instead)” was left UNchecked. This seemed to pull the posters with the filename convention of “exactly the same as the movie file, with additional details such as codecs, etc.” and with “-poster” at the end. However, I was doing the library rebuild in stages due to importing the movie backups in stages, and I noticed at one point the “Disable local media support for artwork, trailers and subtitles (use local media assets instead)” option had toggled ON somehow (very odd) and when scanning the library for the newly imported movies, the poster was not automatically pulled. Having made sure this option was OFF again, I was able to pull the posters when refreshing metadata.
And for those wondering why I use this agent, it is because the Plex agents seem to use TMDB for its movie info such as certifications, whereas TMDB is truly awful as it is missing certifications for about 50% of my movies (very important for parental control), whereas IMDB does not, so I use Ember Media Manager to get the certifications, etc as well as artwork.
