People Image Questions

[saj 10]

I have tried quite hard not to ask these question because I can see that issues about how people images are handled have been discussed a lot. I have read many of those discussions and done searches. Still, I have questions.

 

For images displayed for people associated with a movie or TV series, or anything else for that matter, I am guessing that the difference represented by displaying either a blank gray box or a blank brightly colored box is that for the former, no entry was found in the metadata sources and for the latter, an entry was found but contained no image. Is that correct?

 

I have a surprising number of both gray boxes and colored boxes for people associated with movies throughout my database. I have all the available metadata sources turned on, and I have tried several approaches to getting these filled in, short of plugging them myself. I would think that there are images readily available for most folks in show business. Anyway, I just went to the first movie in my database and picked out the first gray box in the people display. When I looked on TMDB, there was an image readily available for him. So, I selected the refresh metadata option for the entire movie with image replacement, I ran Refresh People and then Scan media library. The image was not updated. I then selected refresh metadata for the person with image replacement and ran Scan media library. Then the image was filled in. So, does refreshing metadata for a movie (or TV show, etc.) with image replacement not refresh people images? If not, why not? Why are there so many missing images? It's hard to believe none of those were available when the movies were added to the library, and I do have the setting to preload the images turned on. Is there no way to get rid of most of those gray boxes (and perhaps some of the colored ones too) except by individually refreshing each individual person entry?

 

Obviously I would much prefer not to rebuild my entire library, and I don't even know if that would give me a great improvement, since it's hard to understand why so many images are missing in the first place.

 

Thank you for any guidance.

 

[jonomite 29]

I think I'm experiencing a similar issue. I've noticed an increasing number of gray boxes for people lately. Refreshing metadata with image replacement doesn't work but, as you note, refreshing metadata with image replacement on the person itself does seem to work. But why isn't it being caught in the first place?

[dansblackcat 37]

There's a few threads already discussing this issue.

 

Here's some-

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/85812-artistsactors-images-disappeared-randomly/?hl=%2Bpeople+%2Bmissing

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/86323-tmdb-corrupt-image-fix-plugin-for-windows-10/&do=findComment&comment=883543

Edited May 25, 2020 by dansblackcat

[saj 10]

Thanks dansblackcat for that feedback. I had read the first post but not the second. It looks like the fixer program is still somewhat a work in progress. However, I still don't understand why refreshing the metadata for a movie with the replace images option doesn't refresh the people entries. Why should we have to refresh each one individually to cause any action?

[Luke 37058]

Thanks dansblackcat for that feedback. I had read the first post but not the second. It looks like the fixer program is still somewhat a work in progress. However, I still don't understand why refreshing the metadata for a movie with the replace images option doesn't refresh the people entries. Why should we have to refresh each one individually to cause any action?

It does. Any people that don't have images will get them during this process.

[saj 10]

Hi Luke,

 

Sorry, but my testing just does not bear that out. As I described in my original post, that is not what I am seeing, and I just ran another test to be sure. First of all, I would appreciate your verifying exactly what a gray box and a brightly colored blank box signify for a person image. I am assuming a gray box would mean a missing image, but what is the difference? Twice I have found a gray image that has a proper person image in The MovieDB. In both cases, I refreshed the metadata for the movie with image replacement and then ran refresh people and the library scan, and the images were NOT updated. I then refreshed the metadata with image replacement for the individual person and reran the library scan. Then the image showed up. It just doesn't seem to be working the way you describe, at least for me. I wish it did.

 

Thanks

[Happy2Play 8281]

Hi Luke,

 

Sorry, but my testing just does not bear that out. As I described in my original post, that is not what I am seeing, and I just ran another test to be sure. First of all, I would appreciate your verifying exactly what a gray box and a brightly colored blank box signify for a person image. I am assuming a gray box would mean a missing image, but what is the difference? Twice I have found a gray image that has a proper person image in The MovieDB. In both cases, I refreshed the metadata for the movie with image replacement and then ran refresh people and the library scan, and the images were NOT updated. I then refreshed the metadata with image replacement for the individual person and reran the library scan. Then the image showed up. It just doesn't seem to be working the way you describe, at least for me. I wish it did.

 

Thanks

 

A grey box is a corrupt/provider deleted image as discussed in linked topic above.  Colored boxes represents no image at all.

 

Refreshing a Movie will not refresh the person unless it only searches for people images that are not currently in the database.

 

Since TMDB deleted the image that is currently listed in your database, only the plugin, manual database editing, or a new database will resolve the broken image is created by the provider site.

Edited May 28, 2020 by Happy2Play

[saj 10]

Thank you for the clear answer. Sorry I missed the distinction about the gray boxes being broken images in my reading.. I'm trying the plugin to see how it does. Nice that someone would make the effort to do that for this (we hope) one-time problem.

[saj 10]

Just to provide some feedback on the plugin, it fixed over 6,000 bad image links in my library. That's great. It did leave quite a few unfixed for whatever reason, so I will probably fix those manually over time.

 

Thanks

[saj 10]

One suggestion. It would be helpful if Emby would update an image displayed for an item (movie, TV show, etc.) immediately after a refresh of the image is done. Instead, one has to select the image and view it or leave the item display and come back to see the change.