Some music files show artwork, but others don't?

General Discussions
1

Searching for “music” and “art” in the discussions turns up a few people with this issue (plus a huge number of false topic matches) but they all seem to be old complaints and no responses. So I’ll try again in the hope that I’ve got an easy-to-solve situation.

I have a music-only library consisting nearly entirely of albums I’ve ripped myself to FLAC (using MediaMonkey, if that matters). All the artwork is embedded in the files.

Running Plex Media Server on a ReadyNAS (up-to-date version), and have attempted to persuade it to use just the embedded artwork rather that trying to pull something else off the net. However the Plex browser shows artwork for only about 10% of the albums. I haven’t found any difference between the ones it manages to do and the ones it doesn’t.

Here’s what I’ve tried:

  • Confirmed the files have pictures correctly in the FLAC metadata
  • Rescanned the library multiple times

Any suggestions? Thanks.

2

First thing to do is make sure Plex is fully configured to use embedded metadata. There’s more than just the one checkbox.

3

I’m not too knowledgeable on such stuff, but is it possible the artwork is an unsupported format?

4

Thanks Beckfield, I think I had actually found your helpful instructions sometime in the past, and had all those settings pretty much as you describe. I attempted to do the Plex Dance but the instructions no longer quite match the functions available. Instead of being able to “update library” I remove the library completely, cleaned it’s head, and started over. After a suitable cooling-off period I went back in and inspected.
Unfortunately, now I seem to have no album art at all, even the handful that somehow had appeared originally is no longer there (implying it isn’t a media file format/tag issue). Perhaps I’ll poke around in the logs. Sigh.