FYI I converted my movies library (5,500 movies) from the old scraper to the new scraper. I can’t say for sure exactly which locked posters got changed, but I know at least several films for which I made and uploaded custom posters to TMDb got changed, and it seems very unlikely they were not locked because my whole point to upload those posters was to set them locally.
I checked through the films (including films without locked posters) and found that approximately 1,300 (26% of the library) had been replaced by posters that weren’t just different than the ones the films had before, they were actively bad posters: cluttered with text (see: Citizen Kane), bizarre fonts, AI generated style, huge clickbait floating heads. The worst ones are the ones that look like dollar store DVD releases of the films. I can confirm these were all Plex defaults because in many cases when I was searching posters on Google Images to try to show friends how obviously terrible the posters were, the result that surfaced near the top was from the Plex CDN.
In trying to fix this, around 80% of the films could be fixed just by switching to TMDb’s top poster, so this is a case where actually doing less work and defaulting to TMDb would significantly improve the quality of results. After around 2 days of work I got my library back to acceptable shape.
I have not yet catalogued cases outside these 1,300 – but there are also lots of cases where iconic and beloved posters for films got swapped for visually acceptable but worse posters. As an example of what I mean, the poster for Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is acceptable: https://images.plex.tv/photo?size=medium-360&scale=2&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmetadata-static.plex.tv%2Fc%2Fgracenote%2Fc91ce63aabedcc3f3735b667dc8c6ae3.jpg it’s a screenshot of the film, vectorized and posterized in sort of an awkward and not especially appealing effect, with a bottom half that lists the title in a not particularly well considered or composed font. Something like this image is on Mubi and Amazon, so I assume it’s from Gracenote originally. By contrast, TMDb has 9 (6 non-duplicate) English language posters for this movie, all of which are better than the Plex choice: A Brighter Summer Day (1991) - Posters — The Movie Database (TMDB) . The iconic art used for the Criterion release comes first and would be my preference. Three posters feature the exact same image from the Plex poster, but without the posterized filter and with better and more thoughtful text. This movie isn’t the important thing, the same process could be easily repeated with any number of movies.
This reinforced to me two issues:
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The major issue here is not just that posters being changed, it’s how unbelievably, indescribably, obviously bad the Gracenote posters are. People are going to notice and react when their library is ugly as hell and they know it wasn’t like that before. If the posters were changing to cool looking posters, I think no one would notice. And there are objective criteria here: what you think is the best most artistic poster might differ from me, but no one wants pictures of DVDs, or covers with paragraphs of unreadable texts, unnecessary awards laurels, etc.
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It sure seems to me like at least during the library conversion process, poster locks were not being respected for some or all of the films I had custom posters set. Since I didn’t preserve the logs or set up debug logging in advance of the conversion, I’m afraid I can’t prove this, but now I can add my personal experience to the wall of people saying it happens.
