How do you “lock” them?
Web Interface: There’s an edit icon in the lower left of each poster. Click that, and there should be a “Poster” menu on the left of the edit window.
Selecting a poster there, and pressing Save Changes is the only way I know of to lock something down with their provided posters.
This won’t guarantee a lock in, as your preferred poster could possibly be dropped from the available pool. That happens pretty infrequently, but often enough to where I rarely bother with it.
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Sounds like I’m already doing this…so you say it can get dropped? Is there anyway to prevent that or is it normal function for it to change posters ever so often? Thanks for this info BTW!
I do what AmazingRando24 mentioned to “lock” posters if I’m being particular about it (sometimes I don’t really worry about it for some movies) and it works pretty well. Lots of folks seeing changes recently due to the default poster provider changing at Plex but so far, after going through and updating the ones that changed from that it’s stayed on the one I picked through multiple refreshes.
When I want a default poster to stick, I’ll pick something else then go back to the default one. I don’t know if that’s all necessary really but it’s what I do (just going to the edit screen with the poster might be enough).
The way a poster can be dropped is if the source pulls it - like if TMDB gets a report on it.
If you really really don’t want posters to change you’ll have to use your own. I’ve never had one I uploaded myself change on me.
Using PlexDash on your phone can make it easy to update\fix artwork if you don’t want to get into the web interface. I do this if I notice a wrong poster\background while browsing via TV. https://www.plex.tv/plex-labs/
I also just found on Reddit, to “lock” the titles in the editor on each poster you want to keep to prevent changes…does that work?
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I will give this a shot!
Yes, they can be dropped. The only way to really lock something down is to manually load your own posters.
I don’t know how the system actually works in such regard… but since it all relies on third party resources I assume there are a number of reasons a poster could be pulled. One of which is a copyright claim. I have a few movies sitting in my library as we speak that have no available posters.
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Manually “locking” them does not work.
For every poster, I always change them.
That still isn’t enough as I’ll often find that Plex decided it should be a different poster. This also doesn’t mean the poster suddenly “vanished” as you can typically still find it within the Poster options.
The problem is that Plex refuses to actually allow you to lock posters even though this has been a requested feature for years.
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Yup, that’ll lock those fields. I do that for sort titles for movies like Animal House and Van Wilder that have “National Lampoons” as part of the title and I don’t want them alphabatized by the N so I remove that bit, but I leave it in the title.
Yeah… there’s always been a bit of whack-a-mole either from sources changing their content or bugs throwing it off and the recent change in sources for defaults (to Gracenote instead of TMDB) really made it obvious. The copy write aspect is what I believe was the reason Plex is giving for switching to Gracenote (particularly as their business model moves to paid-for movies which makes that more of a tangle).
My process of “locking” hasn’t been 100% - selecting something different and then picking what I wanted to stick - but out of the 1000 movie titles I only had to fix a poster or two every few months or so really; TMDB changes weren’t often but it also didn’t take much voting on the posters to get the default to switch there either.
Posters I added to Plex myself have always stuck unless a bug borked the poster selection entirely (had a bug flip several local posters to screen grabs once).
I think Plex’s response to the locking posters question has been to use local posters and\or turn off refreshing metadata. Some folks have some pretty robust systems for managing this as well - look for Dokuro’s posts as they use only local artwork. Tools like FileBot can even automate it for you (which is what I think Dokuro uses).
Often feels like those at Plex don’t even use their own software with how badly they handle some things.
Some MetaData should often be refreshed, but it should allow you to select what can even get refreshed. If I could just tell the refresher to skip posters / background, then that would work.
…but it would also work if they just added the option to lock them, and that ties back to how it feels like they rarely use their own software.
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It would be nice to have a “lock” option for artwork like all the text fields.
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I believe filebot can be used to download artwork but to be honest I don’t use that function of filebot myself. I use filebot for renaming as well as detecting unwanted changes at TMDB or TVDB via their extended attributes functionality.
I did add a comment to another thread on this exact topic earlier so I’ll link it here as to not repeat myself 
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I agree 100%
I learned a new thing! Didn’t know FileBot could handle posters. Will have to dig into that.
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Here you go → How about sharing your CLI scripts? - FileBot
Don’t think the GUI does it but their github scripts GitHub - filebot/scripts: Groovy Scripts for FileBot do. They worked well enough from when I looked at them last year. However, I ended up just going to posterdb (https://theposterdb.com) so it became less useful in the end (at least for me).
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Can we get an official option to lock posters in the server settings? The rate at which my posters get randomly changed has increased a LOT in recent weeks. Used to be an occasional annoyance, now it’s just constant. Posters I manually selected don’t get spared either.
Surely this is something we shouldn’t’ have to solve with cumbersome 3rd party software workarounds.
Edit: OMG I just went through my library. More than half the posters have been changed now. All the iconic posters replaced with utter trash. This is gonna take HOURS to clean up. WHY?!?!
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Merged these topics together.
I still have this request
Сделайте так, чтоб при клике на постер его можно было бы сохранить локально.
Is there anything I can manually select artwork with and download it into my local folder? Plex was always a little bit quirky about it artwork but I accepted it. Now I would like to change the default behaviour and switch to local artwork to avoid Plex default behaviour. I know that Filebot is supposed to be able to do it. But I rather would like to have some sort of UI which Filebot is missing for this case.
