Too Many Movie Posters?

General Discussions
1

I normally manually choose a movie poster that most closely resembles the original Blu-ray or DVD packaging. I’ve noticed that there may be 12 - 18 choices, most of which I’m not interested in. I assume that every one of these potential choices has been downloaded to my PLEX server. I also assume that these downloaded options are simply wasting hard drive space.

  1. Where are these files stored exactly?
  2. Is it possible to delete the ones you do not wish to ever use?
  3. Is it possible to prevent them from being redownloaded once deleted?

Thanks!

2
  1. Depends on the platform you’re running your PMS on
  2. Plex Downloads them into *.bundle files each averaging around 300 kB in my case. I wouldn’t mess with them, they’re probably linked in the PMS and will cause trouble when gone
  3. No
3

@XrayDoc88 said:

  1. Where are these files stored exactly?

Depends on you OS and setup configuration. For the default locations

  1. Is it possible to delete the ones you do not wish to ever use?
    I believe you can.(but point #3 may come up)
  1. Is it possible to prevent them from being redownloaded once deleted?
    That I don’t know. I’m in another thread talking about a similar thing. Unfortunately, that post is in the PP-member only section so you will not have access to it. But the gist of it is another user has over 1 million metadata files and I’m just about to that million mark myself. I’ll link to the page nonetheless.
    https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/304813/extremely-many-files-in-plexdata
    For me I have noticed not only does it download all the posters but it downloadeds posters in other languages and MANY of them are duplicates. So 1 movie may have 150 files(posters and whatnot)
    Luckily @ChuckPA is helping me look at the issue.
4

Just move your Local App Data (The Path Where Local Application Data Is Stored) to a local drive with ample space and don’t worry about it. Most people sweat this stuff when Plex is on an SDD with about 5 bytes free. My path takes that stuff to a 3TB spinner with the added benefit that when my OS Drive goes belly up (what time is it?) I just install a new one, install Plex and aim it back at my data. All done.

5

@XrayDoc88 said:
I normally manually choose a movie poster that most closely resembles the original Blu-ray or DVD packaging. I’ve noticed that there may be 12 - 18 choices, most of which I’m not interested in. I assume that every one of these potential choices has been downloaded to my PLEX server. I also assume that these downloaded options are simply wasting hard drive space.

  1. Where are these files stored exactly?
  2. Is it possible to delete the ones you do not wish to ever use?
  3. Is it possible to prevent them from being redownloaded once deleted?

Thanks!

  1. As Tom said (Platform dependent)
  2. You can but it’s a great deal of work to track down the exact pathnames. You will need to dig through the database directly
  3. We’re trying to figure out what is causing the problem for some users. I don’t have the problem and have more media indexed than some of those with over 1 million files.
6

My PLEX server is located on a Netgear ReadyNAS. I believe it has a Linux operating system. I’m not sure I should try or if it is even possible to have the downloaded posters reside somewhere else. I also get lots of foreign language poster downloads. I was just thinking about the cumulative effect of so many unwanted poster downloads. I wish the PLEX developers would change the system so that once you pick your favorite, the others delete automatically. They could keep an option to re-download everything if you change your mind.

7

@XrayDoc88 said:
I wish the PLEX developers would change the system so that once you pick your favorite, the others delete automatically.

Or at least have “not in use” posters be deleted when cleaning bundles…
But I think the whole “download all” is a bug that for some reason happens the some users but not all.