Stop. Changing. My. Posters

General Discussions
1

I spend a lot of time customizing my posters and making them just right.
There’s absolutely no reason for Plex to be shifting my posters around, especially after I took the time to choose specific ones.
Doubly so when the posters Plex insists on shifting my library to are the absolute ugliest choices available.

I realize that this can be prevented by storing my posters in the local directory but it shouldn’t be an issue to begin with.
I also know I’m not the only one with this issue, I’ve seen multiple posts on the Plex subreddit voicing their dissatisfaction with this behaviour. But I want to add my voice to the many: LEAVE MY POSTERS ALONE!

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2

I rarely change my poster choices, so I left them with the defaults, but only because the default posters USED to be the actual movie poster. Now with this change to a new poster provider, they must be using the fugliest AI-generated look-a-like posters to stay copyright free, and those are chosen as the “default” now.

Thankfully, my Plex had already downloaded the GOOD posters for my movies from before, so those are still available to select manually, but that won’t help going forward.

I fail to see how a poster that is publicly and freely available on TMDB’s own site cannot be automatically pulled and chosen by Plex.

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3

Is that why they changed? Licensing? The new posters are so bad!

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4

that explains why i’ve been seeing random posters being changed.
i know you can lock changes but other than doing it individually is there any way to lock every poster from being changed?

5

Not using the Plex interface, but some people have developed scripts to attempt to not only pick the default TMDB poster instead of Gracenote, but I think it should also lock the poster field to prevent a change in the future?

Might be worth looking over the entire thread to see the story so far.

1 Like
6

Stopping the changing of posters that are already selected will not generate new revenue or social media engagement, so Plex,Inc will never, ever acknowledge this request to stop changing our posters for hundreds of films we have already selected.

I fear the day that Plex,inc actually provides an update that is positive for us paying users.

6 Likes
10

I am equally frustrated with meta data getting overwritten…I just came back from a long weekend and found that 60+ episodes of a custom show (actually my Church’s sermons) were overwritten and identified as some Chinese language shows…I had locked the Title, Posters, Descriptions and dates released…going back for 2 years…all of it has been overwritten!

Why give the option of locking metadata if it doesn’t work!

4 Likes
13

My manually selected posters are changing too.
This is really frustrating because posters that are set by the .jpg in the movies folder are also changing!

Movie 123.mkv
Movie 123.jpg

By Plex’s own documentation, this should not be possible.

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14

@jfreiman if you have Prefer local metadata ( mod edit) and use Local Assets, enabled, please provide the server logs after that happens.

15

Also remember - enabling Prefer local metadata has NO impact on local assets (movie 123.jpg). You need to ensure you have Use local assets enabled for plex to scan and enable these.

Screenshot from 2024-03-05 08-51-22

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16

it’s become a daily chore to now have to check the library each morning to see what movie poster has been changed from the one i had previously explicitly selected

3 Likes
17

A looooooooong time ago I struggled with what you are experiencing now. I came to the conclusion that the only way to fully control my artwork was to include it alongside my movies and tv series.

Its certainly a bit of work and can seem daunting for mid/large libraries but once done it works perfectly and you’ll never look back. I just took it as a couple of movies each day and before I knew it I was done. Both https://theposterdb.com and https://mediux.pro have amazing artwork contributors.

BTW… if you ever manually selected a poster in the plex UI then they maybe considered locked. To fix this use this procedure Reset all manual poster selections in a library at once or unlock other metadata fields. I however, fully rebuilt my library once I completed this work as I did not want to risk any bad data in my db.

Anyhow, food for thought!

1 Like
18

This change of movie posters happens to me as well. Very annoying having spent quite some time getting them right before.

19

remembered and done.

For what it’s worth, Prefer Local Metadata is also checked.

I have all my movies attached with my preferred poster art since I’ve been collecting them for way before there were online sources for them – and yet, my posters are still changing. :wink:

1 Like
20

Interesting. For one that changed how exactly are they named? Maybe upload plex server logs so we can see what might be happening.

21

As noted above I need server logs of that happening.

22

note that this is happening to those that don’t use locally stored images as well.
i have only ever manually selected artwork from those via the agent, however each morning i’m seeing various titles where the artwork has been changed.

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23

Regardless of how or to whom it happens, I need server logs and steps to repeat after it happens

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24

Server Version#:1.40.0.7998

Has anyone else experienced movie posters changing at random? Is this a glitch? Or do I need to check a setting that perhaps could be causing this? I just want to “lock” them in a way where they can’t be changed. Thanks!

25

Happens all the time as new posters make their way into their respective #1 slots. You can lock them individually, but I’m not sure that helps if your preferred selection gets dropped from the poster pool.
The only way to guarantee it is to download your own posters and lock those in.

1 Like