Saving the last used directory when selecting custom posters

Plex Players Desktop Players
1

Server Version#: 1.16.5.1554
Player Version#: 1.2.0.875

I have always used Plex Web to handle administrative duties on my server, such as setting custom posters. I would click the pencil icon in the bottom left hand corner of the screen and the Edit Properties box appears. I would then click on Poster and the click on Choose Image. In the windows file popup box, it would default to the last used directory. All I had to do was search for the file and click open. It worked great.

A few days ago, I wanted to try out the new Plex for Windows app. It looks great, nice and clean. I do have a problem with how it sets custom posters. Every time I click on Choose Image, it brings up the directory where Plex was installed. I have about 9 clicks to get to the directory where I store my posters (it depends on what type of poster I want) and then it doesn’t save the directory, meaning for my next item, I have to do the 9 clicks again.

By the way, I recently had to install Plex again after a hard drive crash, so I do have lots of items to fix.

Am I doing something wrong? Is this how it’s supposed to work? Maybe it’ll get fixed in an upcoming release? In the mean time, I may decide to use the Web version to get my data cleaned up.

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Don’t “upload” posters in the web app. It is a convenient feature, yes. But keep in mind that all of this work will be gone if your server hard disk is ever damaged/erased/formatted.

It is much better to store the posters beside your media files. That way they get backed up together with your media. You do backups, right?
If you name them right, they will get picked up automatically by Plex.

Read the ‘Local Media Assets’ articles:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/your-media/

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The article that you provided me basically shows where to load your custom posters for movies and tv shows, but what about music? There are 2 reasons that I use custom posters for music, either there isn’t one that appears automatically or I just don’t like the automatic ones. Are you saying that if I store the custom poster inside of the same directory as the music, then the custom poster would appear automatically? Would that also happen for each album too, i.e. if I store a poster inside of an album directory, it would appear on that album?

What I did for music was to create a directory inside of my main music directory and it was just for custom posters. Each time that I wanted to load one, I would use the procedure in my first paragraph.

4

That’d only happen if you move ‘Local Media Assets’ to the top for the respective agent.
But for video files, this will also prioritize embedded metadata. Many mp4/m4v Files contain useless/wrong/spammy metadata which you’d either have to clean out or edit.

However what placing the artwork in there will do in any case, is to make it available for selection when you edit the item in Plex.

Here’s how to name music artwork:

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I’m so confused at my music library right now. I’ve been spending hours yesterday and today reading forum posts. All I know is that before my disk crashed and I had to restore my database last week, my music library had cover posters for each artists and each album. Now only 336 of my 528 artists have cover posters. At quick glance, it looks like the ones that I did myself are still there. I’m missing the ones that should have come directly from the internet (I’m not sure where they are grabbed from but they arrive after you update new music). I used to just manually choose an image if I didn’t like it or there wasn’t one. They were also clear but now some are clear and some are blurry.

I use this file structure:
/music
/artist - album
01 track.mp3
02 track.mp3
03 track.mp4
/artist - album
01 track.mp3
02 track.mp3
etc

I don’t use any meta loading programs, but I ensure via Windows Explorer that the following fields are correct before loading into Plex: Title, Contributing Artists, Album, Album Artist, Genre.

I have a subdirectory called “aa Covers” and it is the very first subdirectory in my music directory and it contains some custom posters, both for artists and albums. If I’m going to use a custom one, I put it there and then I do the “choose an image” option. The majority of posters are automatic and they’re usually fine so I usually accept them.

Because of my current issues with cover art, I’ve looked at some of my album directories. Sometimes I have AlbumArt and sometimes I don’t, but mostly I don’t.

I’m not sure what happened, but things are not consistent. Some examples:

(1) artist with 4 albums, the artist cover is blank but the 4 album covers are correct. No custom posters for artist or albums and no AlbumArt

(2) artist with 11 albums, the artist cover is the automatically generated one and only 3 of the albums have the correct cover and the rest of the albums have the same as the artist one. These same 3 albums happen to have an AlbumArt pic in their directory. There are 2 custom album posters that didn’t get used since they are still the same the artist one

(3) artist with 11 albums, the artist cover is the auto gen one and 10 albums have a cover but 1 doesn’t. There are no custom posters. 2 of the albums have AlbumArt but the rest don’t. The one with the missing cover art is not one of those 2.

(4) Lots of examples where some artists have posters and some don’t. Some album have posters and some don’t. Some album directories have AlbumArt files and some don’t. Some artist and albums have custom posters and some don’t.

I’ve changed the Local Media Assets from line 1 to line 2 for both Artist and Album. I’ve checked it and unchecked it. I don’t know how to save changes. I don’t know what last.fm is. I’ve heard not to use it anyway.

This used to be fine a few weeks ago. Not sure how to fix it now. My final questions:
(1) What can I do to fix this?
(2) What does Personal Media Artist and Personal Media Albums mean?
(3) I can change my file structure to have all of the same artists inside of its own directory if that helps with custom artist poster. Need to?
(4) I don’t know how to make Plex go out and get pictures from the internet. I click on Refresh Metadata, but after the curser spirals, nothing is changed. There are lots that have came from the internet but I can’t get more to refresh automatically. This applies to artists and albums.
(5) I don’t want to use a meta update program for each song. I don’t think I need to. Agree?

Sorry for lengthy post.

6
  1. you can wait a few weeks for the new music support in Plex. Important information regarding Premium Music libraries in Plex
    Or you can add those missing cover art yourself, after the method in the link above.
  2. It’s the name of the agent you can use if neither last.fm nor PLex Music give you any matches
  3. I recommend it. You can automate this with the right software and if your media already have proper embedded metadata. see Artist Artwork for an example.
  4. This might change in a few weeks
  5. what?
7

Thanks for your help so far. I didn’t know there was a big music update coming. I’ll eagerly wait for it. Please consider changing the whole Agent section because I find the wording, layout and how to set it up confusing.

I want it to get the cover art for the artist and album from the internet with the ability for me to overwrite it if I want to and then not to have it change if I have overridden it. A simple way for me to overwrite it would be to put a picture in the artist folder or album folder.

I await your changes.

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