When adding movies after doing the update to version 1.25.4 on my QNAP NAS, the actors are apparently being added in some different way than they were before. When selecting one of the actors listed for a new movie added after the update, Plex will only pull up other new movies (added after the update) in which that actor appears, and will NOT pull up any of the older movies (added before the update) in which that actor appears. When searching for the actor by name, it will return TWO results for the same actor - one which pulls up only all the older movies, and a second one which pulls up only the new movies.
I’ve tried telling Plex to update the metadata on the new movies, but no change. If I tell Plex to update the metadata for one of the old movies, it moves it into the “new” category, but I’d really prefer not to have to update the metadata on my over 4,000 movies to solve this problem. Is there any way to stop the update from creating this new category of actors or otherwise force the “new” movies to use the same actors as all my older movies?
Updating the metadata of the entire library in order to bring the “legacy” person data (cast/directors) in sync with the new ones is the only way. Usually your server will do this automatically if you haven’t disabled the related scheduled tasks.
Background for this issue is a change that happened some months ago. Plex introduced some new GUIDs for those actors to avoid mixing up same-named actors etc. Those are however different from the old organization which is causing you to see the same actor 2x in your search results.
Thanks for the information. Based on what I had read and seen, it seemed like this was going to be the answer to this specific issue, and doing the refresh did indeed solve this specific problem. However, doing the wholesale metadata refresh just highlighted another longstanding issue which really should be addressed after all this time - PLEASE GIVE US A WAY TO STOP PLEX FROM CHANGING OUR MOVIE POSTERS !!
I’ll start another thread regarding this issue since it’s not directly related to this actor problem - it will probably just join the 40 or 50 other locked threads from the last few years that I found while searching for an answer that never came, but at least it will give me a place to vent about having to go through this agitating process again for the second time in the last couple of weeks.
This exists already. Use local assets for your artwork be it posters or backgrounds. Its the ONLY true way to control what artwork appears in plex.
Artwork can change in plex for many reasons, one common example is if the artwork has been deleted from the source metadata provider. It will then eventually be deleted from plex and the poster changed.
Thanks for the suggestion - I ran across some vague references to this concept in some of the old locked threads I read, but I never really found a clear explanation of how to do this. And the thought of having to go through and somehow manually obtain and store some 4,500 movie posters locally is pretty daunting (although it might be worth it given that I’ve had to deal with this poster fix process twice now in the last couple of weeks). Also, is it really certain that doing this will prevent Plex from replacing the posters done this way? There were plenty of statements in those old locked threads to the effect that Plex would not replace posters that you had specifically selected, but that’s clearly not true as it has replaced many of the posters I had previously manually selected.
Can you point me to something that explains exactly how to create, store and use local copies of posters? Also, is there an easy way to download a poster from among those offered up by Plex in order to turn it into a local asset? (I have a lot of posters that I’ve previously downloaded to my harddrive because none of the choices offered by Plex were acceptable, but there are thousands of others that I did choose from among those offered by Plex that I’d need to D/L and store locally for this approach to work).
I understand and its certainly a decent amount of up front work but well worth it in the end. I decided to switch to local assets approx 1+ year ago and I’d never look back. I’d approx 2,000 movies and 300 shows at the time so fully appreciate the work involved. However, I never now have a poster change unless I change it and they are exactly how I have set them up.
Agreed. Locked posters work until they don’t. I’ve no firm evidence of it but I suspect the deleting from source example is one use case it fails. So, if say TMDB has duplicate posters for a movie and you selected one of them which was then deleted later from TMDB I think plex will not keep the poster. That was my conclusion over a year ago anyhow but things might be better now
Then in your libraries advanced settings just ensure you have Use local assets enabled.
Then force refresh the movie when you add the files and your good to go. For poster sources I typically use https://theposterdb.com and https://www.themoviedb.org.
EDIT: One last thing. This document might also be of help Reset all manual poster selections in a library at once or unlock other metadata fields. Its basically a way to reset all the manual poster selections in your library. This will UNLOCK anything that is locked related to artwork (and other stuff if you want). I found it very helpful myself recently and might be of use to you.
Well, I thought I understood how this was supposed to work, but I just tried a proof of concept run by adding my own poster.jpg files to the folders for about 50 of my movies. I told the library to scan the movies files, and then refreshed the metadata for all 50 of the test movies, but Plex is not consistently using the local posters (it does on some, but not others). I tried individually on a few of the movies, manually selecting a different poster and then refreshing the metadata to see if it would pick up the poster I stored locally, but it doesn’t.
I wasn’t sure about the relevance of that last thing you mentioned - do I really have to go through the process of unlocking every poster in the database in order to make Plex use the locally-stored poster files?
Is there any way to unlock the movies one by one, so I can test whether that allows the new local posters to be assigned before unlocking my entire library?
Not that I’m aware of but maybe @OttoKerner would know. Anyhow, you can just stop plex, create a backup and start it again and test. If it fails or you don’t like what happened then restore your backup.
You can try curl -X PUT "xxxx:32400/library/metadata/yyyy?thumb.locked=0&X-Plex-Token=zzzz"
where yyyy is the movie’s internal ID number (which can be gleaned from the movie’s Plex XML info. It is the number in the XML property ratingKey="yyyy".)
Ok - thanks. Getting ready to give this a try, but stumbled on the first step in the other document you referenced:
" Preparation:
You need access to the curl command or have an equivalent way of sending commands per http to your server. (There is also a Windows version of curl available.)"
I found some info from Microsoft saying that Curl was supposedly included in Windows 10, but I don’t know how to “access” it. Do you just open up a cmd window and type in the line you posted starting with “curl …”?
Excellent - that appears to have worked on the one movie I tried. This time, upon refreshing the metadata for that one movie, it picked up the locally stored poster. I guess I need to store something really weird/unrelated to the movie and try it again, just to make sure it wasn’t just picking up a poster from the agent that happened to be the same one I had chosen to store locally, but it’s a good start.
Thanks for such prompt and helpful replies.
[EDIT] I tried with some random poster and it is indeed using the locally stored poster now when I refresh the metadata on that particular movie. Guess I’ll go ahead and populate all the posters I can find before I unlock the whole library, and then do it all once the replacements are in place.
