[Solved] Album art picker showing unrelated posters

Plex Players Desktop Players
1

Server Version#: 1.15.0.573
Player Version#: 3.77.4

I was going through and updating all the low quality posters for my music album library in Plex and I see the following behaviour after selecting edit > poster

  1. Sometimes there are completely unrelated posters, though this listing is always the same

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    plex_album_art_picker1.PNG733×533 248 KB

  2. Sometimes it has unrelated posters (1 or more) mixed with related posters

    plex_album_art_picker3
    plex_album_art_picker3.PNG725×531 216 KB
    plex_album_art_picker2
    plex_album_art_picker2.PNG727×537 131 KB

Note: Though I have been using the PMS alpha this behaviour is not new. I have also purged any folder.jpg and smallthumbs.jps files just in case.

Curious as to why this is but, more importantly, I wanted to know how can I purge this? Is there a central place where Plex is keeping this information. Ideally, if there are no related posters I would prefer it to be blank.

2

I am pretty sure this is caused by the same as this one

3

@OttoKerner, thanks for the quick reply. I will give that a shot and let you know.

4

After following the instructions on the other page, including removing all jpg files and moving the Local Media Assets agent to the bottom of all the sections, and then re-scanning my music library, I still see the reported issue.

To use a smaller example for testing, I took the U2 album in the screen shot above and did the Plex dance with it but when I look at the poster section it is still the same as above.

5

It is very important to not only activate the display of ‘hidden’ files in Windows file explorer, but also ‘system’ files. (this is a separate check box)

And you must not only look into the folder of the album, but also higher up in the folder hierarchy.

6

Understood (I read in the instructions :wink: ) …I did do the system files, which did show a lot more other jpg (e.g. cover.jpg) and, as I mentioned, I removed all of them.

I did my search at the root of my media > music directory, not just the album folders.

7

Do you have a folder structure
Music > Artist > Album
and is every album in its own subfolder?

What kind of music library are you using? Premium or normal?
Is the agent configuration modified from the default?

8

Yes, the structure is Music > Artist > Album and every album is its own subfolder.

AFAIK, my Music library is a normal library (I didn’t do anything special with it when I created it) but I am a lifetime subscriber and there is a Plex Premium section in the settings (so I’m not sure if that means it’s a Premium)

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My agents are setup as:

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9

That means it is a premium library.

If you go to the ‘Add Folders’ tab, are there several locations listed or only the root of your music collection?

Please do this: https://support.plex.tv/articles/202967376-clearing-plugin-channel-agent-http-caches/

Then stop your Plex server and restart it. After ~ 2 minutes perform the Plex Dance with all albums by that artist.

Let’s see if that changes anything.

10

Btw would unchecking the Local Media Assets potentially prevent picking up anything unwanted?

11

There is only the one folder in the Add Folders tab

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12

It might. But it will also prevent Plex from reading all embedded metadata, which will make the proper matching wholly dependent on your folder and file naming.
So, not really recommended.

With music, I rather prefer my own, embedded metadata because the online meta data sources never have all the internationally available editions of an album listed.

13

Makes sense :slight_smile:

I will go through this later tonight when I get back in front of my server and will let you know. Thanks for assistance.

14

I went through the process (i.e. cleaned the cache, restarted the Plex server, performed the Plex dance after about 5-10 minutes) but still see the same behaviour. There are two albums that show this while the others from the same artist, in the same root folder, do not.

U2 - All that you can’t leave behind
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U2 - How to dismantle an atomic bomb
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U2 - Achtung baby
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I went to the file system (Windows 10) and I checked the details on the files to see if there were some patterns but did not see anything out of the ordinary.

15

Update

I decided to dig a little deeper and used Mp3tag. I did find the extra unrelated poster in the metadata…some were the only cover while others were part of a “set”.

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Once I removed the unrelated one, saved the metadata and did the Plex dance (refreshing the meta data in Plex was not enough), then I no longer see an entry in the Poster section of the dialog.

Now I’m looking into why some of them have a large batch of unrelated posters as shown in my first screenshot at the beginning of this thread. As per Mp3tag there is no poster shown.

16

So I think I figured it out.

The tracks with all of the unrelated posters were part of an “other” sub directory I had with a lot of other mp3 files. Even though a specific track had a correct poster on them and organized by the correct album in Plex, by removing the poster in Mp3tag and then refreshing the metadata in Plex (not just a scan but a metadata refresh) then nothing really appeared to change…however the posters in the Poster section of the dialog only showed related posters.

Perhaps during a previous scrub somehow Plex associated the poster metadata from the surrounding tracks into that dialog? Ironically, the files are still all grouped in the same “other” sub directory but are now showing only track specific posters (for the ones I have corrected so far).

I’m not sure if that is how this all ended up but seems I might have a lot of early Spring cleaning to do :wink:

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