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“Refresh all metadata” is kind of a black box, in particular concerning posters. Some posters change, others do not. And Chatty’s answers are not very helpful either.
I have more than 13K movies, each with their own poster file, which I sometimes edit to make them ‘cleaner’. I do not want these posters to change at all. But there seems to be no reliable way to prevent this when refreshing all metadata.
So my question is: Is there a reliable way?
Or is it too much to ask for an option “Refresh all metadata – except posters”?
If the poster files are always present, the option “Use local assets” in the library properties should make it so that they are always preferred over the online posters.
However, this will only work if the poster hasn’t been previously manually changed by selecting another poster in the item’s properties. If this is an older library which has already seen quite a few changes and agent switches, you probably want to reset that “poster lock” that is caused by manually selecting a poster, so it falls back to the default.
See Reset all manual poster selections in a library at once or unlock other metadata fields
Thanks a lot for the very fast response!
Yes, I “Use local assets”, and my library is more than ten years old. But before I dive into the technical process described in the manual page, please tell me: if I do unlock all posters, how can I be sure that the next refresh picks up all my local posters? As I said, each movie has its own folder, and in there there is a poster.jpg (and some more). This is the one I want to see in Plex.
Thanks again.
Unlock the posters of only a few items then as a test. You should be able to modify the query parameter so it only applies to a specific item id number.
Then Refresh Metadata of this item and see what happens.
Okay. I will try.
A related question. Chatty told me that Plex may get confused if in a movie folder there are files poster.jpg, poster-1.jpg, poster-2.jpg. Then it may pick any of these, not just poster.jpg. Is this true? This would explain a lot.
Not sure what “confused” means. Having several posters as jpg is very much part of the official specification: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220677-local-media-assets-movies/
However, it is not specified which of these is supposed to get selected by default.
Well, that is the whole point. I always thought it is specified – namely pick poster.jpg, and not anything else.
So this means I have to give other names to the extra poster files. Is posters-1.jpg, posters-2.jpg enough, or do I have to change the first six letters, say xposter-1.jpg, xposter-2.jpg, or something like that?
I couldn’t say, I don’t have access to the code.
I’d say just try it out. Or maybe move the excess posters into a subfolder.
Ok, I will try.
But I think it should be made clear in the support documents that having poster.jpg and poster-1.jpg does not determine which file is taken. The way it is stated meant to me that it is always poster.jpg, and nothing else. This is somewhat unexpected behaviour. But maybe there are not many people who store several posters for one movie ;→
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After a scientific test with three samples it seems to me that renaming the others to posters-x.jpg is enough to force Plex to pick exactly poster.jpg.
This thing has bugged me for years … unbelievable
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So it is as simple as that:
If you have local assets enabled and refresh all metadata, then Plex will pick your local poster.jpg – if it exists – provided there are no other files named poster-1.jpg, poster-2.jpg, … If there are such files, then Plex picks any of these unpredictably. I have been falling into this trap for many years.
The page https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220677-local-media-assets-movies/ suggests naming local assets like poster.jpg, poster-1.jpg, … . But I suspect this is for the purpose of populating the poster table of a movie item, where you then may pick one to your liking. But if you want one specific poster to show up after metadata refresh, this is a bad idea.
So now I can refresh all metadata without having to clean up thousands of posters afterwards.
