Server Version#: 1.32.5.7349
Player Version#: Plexamp 4.8.1, et. al.
I have my music library configured with the following relevant settings:
Prefer local metadata (checked)
Album Art: Local Files Only
Something happened that caused a lot of the album artwork to use a low-res version. It’s unclear how or why that happened, but that’s irrelevant to this issue.
I expect that if I used “Refresh Metadata” that it would use the album art embedded in my media files. It does not. It’s not clear that “Refresh Metadata” did anything at all related to the album art.
Is this a bug, or has “Refresh Metadata” always ignored local media files?
When “Prefer local metadata” is enabled and “Album Art” is "Local Files Only, Plex should look for album art in this order:
Discrete file (a .jpg, .png, etc., file alongside the music track files. If the album has multiple discs in ‘disc1’ ‘disc2’ subfolders, the image file must be in ‘disc1.’)
Embedded cover image.
It’s done in that order because discrete files are likely to be of higher resolution.
Question: What are your media file types (mp3, flac, etc.)? It may not make a difference, but it may provide a clue.
Things I know of that may prevent Plex from using (correct) embedded art:
Corrupt image - obviously. Probably not the issue here.
Embedded image is not marked as ‘front cover’ type.
First track doesn’t have the embedded image - I suspect that Plex will look at track 2 for art if track 1 doesn’t have it, but I don’t know for sure. I do know that, if each file has a different cover (not supported – Plex does not support individual images for each track), Plex will apply the art from track 1 to the album and ignore the rest.
Multiple embedded images - Several years ago, I noticed that, if there were embedded images for cover art and artist, for example, Plex would take the wrong image as cover art. I eventually switched to using discrete image files, so I have no idea if this was ever fixed (I suspect it wasn’t).
There’s a discrete file that you don’t know about - Some apps, like Windows Media Player, would automatically download a cover art image into the folder with the music.
I think I know what happened. I believe I recently opened up one of my files on my Windows daily driver in Windows Media Player. I think this caused windows to traverse my music directory, adding a “Folder.jpg” and “AlbumArtSmall.jpg” file to each folder. What’s worse, these files are considered “System Files” in Windows, and therefore are not displayed in File Explorer. I found them by looking at the folder contents on the host server.
So, I ran this to delete all JPG files in my music folder:
(disclaimer: don’t run scripts you find on the internet unless you understand exactly what they are doing)
