Prevent generation of MP3 album covers in metadata?

[TobyTentakel 19]

4 hours ago, Luke said:

That's strange. Do your albums have images assigned?

Yes, all tracks have internal cover art in their tags and all album folders have a folder.jpg, and when I click on a library, all album covers are visible in Emby.

This only happened after changing the folder structure setting, previously I had album covers as well as collection images (but also the superfluous image files in the metadata folder). Could it be that the function that creates the collection images requires the files in the metadata folder for albums?

[Luke 37151]

Your albums have images in the albums tab of the music library?

[TobyTentakel 19]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

Your albums have images in the albums tab of the music library?

Yes, all of them!

[TobyTentakel 19]

Sad to report, but suddenly the metadata library folder gets filled again with poster.jpg files from newly added MP3 albums, even though they all have their proper folder.jpg within the same folder. I did not change any library settings and I did not update Emby. Attached is a screenshot of my library settings. It only seems to create the jpg files for new albums I added, so only around 20.000 unnecessary new metadata files at the moment, but that will of course continue to grow, which is not good

Could it be that the settings only work when initially (re-)creating a library, but for newly added stuff, it will always create the metadata poster.jpg files?

[Luke 37151]

Example?

[TobyTentakel 19]

What example should I post? I add an album which is correctly tagged and has a folder.jpg, all within one folder. Emby detects it correctly and adds it to the library, I can see the cover and play the files, all good. However, for every new album, I also get a poster.jpg with the album cover in the metadata/library/... folder. This is only the case for new albums I added, the ones when initially creating the library do not have these unnecessary metadata files 

[TobyTentakel 19]

Here is an example:

1. I add the album "Any Given Thursday" by "John Mayer" to the music library, folder content can be seen in the first screenshot (bunch of tagged MP3s and a file folder.jpg with the album cover).
2. Emby picks it up automatically and adds it to the music library - cover can be seen in the overview, all tracks are correctly assigned and visible, see second screenshot.
3. But for every new album I add, Emby creates a file "poster.jpg" with the album cover in the metadata, in this case under "Emby\metadata\library\bc\bc2f5a37e90395e83f7cc58eba4a1ce8\poster.jpg", see third screenshot

Where does "poster.jpg" come from? Previously I had "folder.jpg", with your help I got rid of this with the specific library settings, but suddenly these "poster.jpg" files now appear instead of the "folder.jpg" ones.

[Luke 37151]

Are you actually experiencing a problem or are you just looking for one by going through the directories?

[TobyTentakel 19]

Emby is really slow on my system once my music libraries reach a certain size, and especially when new stuff gets added it becomes unresponsive for a long time (where I even can't access the admin backend).

I am therefore trying to narrow down any unnecessary actions when new items are added, or at least learn what the system is doing.

Additionally, I don't want to waste disk space for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary files. No matter how small they may be, it adds up.

The problem occurs with every newly added item, by the way, which is why I enquired what process creates the poster.jpg files all of a sudden.

Edited May 31, 2022 by TobyTentakel