How to refresh all Actors/People metadata including bio info

[Cphusion 3]

Something I have noticed which I haven't been able to figure out is that even though all my movies and series are recognized it doesn't show you the bio info. Unless you you specifically go to that actor/actress and click refresh metadata. I'll attach a screenshot of what I mean, one is of where there is no bio info and the other is where the bio info is displayed after having clicked refresh metadata for that specific actor.

 

Under Movie library settings I have the following enabled:

Metadata Readers: Nfo

• Movie Metadata downloaders:
• The MovieDB
• The OpenMovieDatabase
• The TheTVDB

Metadata savers: Nfo

 

Under Tv series library settings I have the following enabled:

Metadata Readers: Nfo

• Tv Metadata downloaders:
• The MovieDB
• The OpenMovieDatabase
• The TVDB
• TV Maze

Metadata savers

I have my movies sorting program, placing local nfo files in the same directory as the movie, with the movie name and nfo extension. For example: "American Psycho (2000).nfo".  The same goes for the Tv series library, in the main series folder I have "tvshow.nfo" and then each season is in a separate folder where each episode has it's own nfo file.

I've tried going to the Movies and Tv series library and selecting "Refresh all metadata", but that doesn't seem to fetch the bio info for the actors and actresses listed under a movie or tv serie. Am I doing something wrong or am I missing something because I find it strange that I would have to manually select "refresh metadata" separately instead of it being refreshed when I tell it do it it for everything under each library?

 

 

 

Edited May 21, 2024 by Cphusion
Uploaded new screenshots

[Happy2Play 9780]

@Cphusionunfortunately once a person is known to Emby there is no easy way to updated them besides manual per person or search and multi-select as many as you can display or get all their itemids from the database and manually send update calls for each per Emby api.

As this really does spam provider sites it is pretty much a once and done design.

Edited May 21, 2024 by Happy2Play

[Cphusion 3]

4 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

unfortunately once a person is known to Emby there is no easy way to updated them besides manual per person or search and multi-select as many as you can display or get all their itemids from the database and manually send update calls for each per Emby api.

That sounds really time consuming to have to do that manually for each actor/actress. How do I multi-select and refresh the metadata of multiple actors/actresses?

[crusher11 1101]

Yeah, this isn't something that would need to be done super regularly, but I've had to manually refresh Eddie Izzard and Elliot Page for pronoun reasons, and there are presumably a number of people who have passed since they were ingested into the system. A way of non-spammily automating it would be neat.

[Neminem 1518]

Im not sure but ctrl+shift mark the 1st and move down to last.

This in Edge browser.

[Happy2Play 9780]

3 minutes ago, jaycedk said:

Im not sure but ctrl+shift mark the 1st and move down to last.

Just shift click first and last.

But a generic search of any three character value.  Looks like search as removed the 3 character requirement.

Edited May 21, 2024 by Happy2Play

[Cphusion 3]

6 minutes ago, crusher11 said:

Yeah, this isn't something that would need to be done super regularly,

That's the reason I would expect it to be done automatically.

 

7 minutes ago, crusher11 said:

A way of non-spammily automating it would be neat.

If it's possible to create an account at one of those providers and pay of a subscription for api calls and that Emby allowed you to enter an api key for the providers, then that would be a possible solution for having it done automatically.

[Neminem 1518]

In my test I think there is a bug, I searched for first letter B went to People tab.

And I only got 50 people, that is not right.

Edited May 21, 2024 by jaycedk

[Cphusion 3]

6 minutes ago, jaycedk said:

Im not sure but ctrl+shift mark the 1st and move down to last.

Is that screenshot a screenshot of one movie you are selecting or is there a place where you can select all a page of people at once?

[Cphusion 3]

5 minutes ago, jaycedk said:

In my test I think there is a bug, I searched for first letter B went to People tab.

You answered my question. Thanks!

[Happy2Play 9780]

Generic Search is the easiest route.  

If it wasn't disabled in the script you could multi-select per movie but have to scroll the entire row.

[Neminem 1518]

Definitely a search bug or limitation. 

[Cphusion 3]

9 minutes ago, Cphusion said:

If it's possible to create an account at one of those providers and pay of a subscription for api calls and that Emby allowed you to enter an api key for the providers, then that would be a possible solution for having it done automatically.

@Happy2PlayWould it be worth the time to put in a feature request for this?

[Neminem 1518]

Yes

[Neminem 1518]

But it's possible in the future

[Happy2Play 9780]

1 minute ago, Cphusion said:

@Happy2PlayWould it be worth the time to put in a feature request for this?

Would have to search but believe there is one.  At the same time provider ie TMDB looks down upon this as users will want to refresh people to often an 200,000+ request is a lot of spamming of any api enen if it were once a month but users would do it more often.

[Cphusion 3]

38 minutes ago, jaycedk said:

Im not sure but ctrl+shift mark the 1st and move down to last.

Thanks this mostly worked, except I ran into a limit of the search providers since nothing is updating right now anymore.

 

21 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Would have to search but believe there is one. 

Then I won't make another one.

 

57 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

As this really does spam provider sites it is pretty much a once and done design.

If Plex can do it without running into issues I think Emby should be able to find a solution for this. The strange thing is with my Jellyfin instance I didn't do anything special for it and it did it automatically for me for all the people it did find.

[Happy2Play 9780]

1 minute ago, Cphusion said:

Thanks this mostly worked, except I ran into a limit of the search providers since nothing is updating right now anymore.

Not sure what you mean here as requests do get throttled.  As I have sent all people via the api and took 4 days for all queries to finish.

So yes it can be done but will be throttled per provider site restrictions.

[Happy2Play 9780]

As for Plex they have their own mirror site is my understanding so they can really do what they want.  And unless they changed the code Jellyfin should be doing the exact same thing as Emby as it was Emby code.

[Luke 42077]

Why do you even need to worry about this? When you click on the person, if they don't have a bio, then Emby will try to fetch it at that time.

[crusher11 1101]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

Why do you even need to worry about this? When you click on the person, if they don't have a bio, then Emby will try to fetch it at that time.

 

3 hours ago, crusher11 said:

Yeah, this isn't something that would need to be done super regularly, but I've had to manually refresh Eddie Izzard and Elliot Page for pronoun reasons, and there are presumably a number of people who have passed since they were ingested into the system. A way of non-spammily automating it would be neat.

 

[Luke 42077]

I think in addition to checking for empty overview, we can also check if the person hasn't had their metadata refreshed within x number of months.

[Cphusion 3]

I actually realized I had made a really bad mistake when having setup Emby, so I redid my Emby server and upon creating my Libraries I ordered my "Metadata downloaders" in the same order as I have with my Jellyfin setup and all the bio info is showing up. So problem seems solved.

1 hour ago, Luke said:

I think in addition to checking for empty overview, we can also check if the person hasn't had their metadata refreshed within x number of months.

That sounds like a good idea too, kind of like how you can select per library how often to update the library metadata but that configure that for people with a global default that you can't change to prevent it from ddosing the providers.

In the mean time I got ChatGPT to write a bash script to do it for me.
 

#!/bin/bash

# Emby server details
EMBY_SERVER_URL="http://localhost:8096"
API_KEY="your_api_key"

# Function to extract JSON values
extract_json_value() {
    local json=$1
    local key=$2
    echo "$json" | sed -n "s|.*\"$key\":\"\([^\"]*\)\".*|\1|p"
}

# Function to update people metadata
update_people_metadata() {
    echo "Fetching all People..."
    
    # Fetching all People
    PEOPLE_JSON=$(curl -s -X GET "$EMBY_SERVER_URL/emby/Persons?api_key=$API_KEY")
    PEOPLE_IDS=$(echo "$PEOPLE_JSON" | grep -o '"Id":"[^"]*' | sed 's/"Id":"//')

    for PERSON_ID in $PEOPLE_IDS; do
        echo "Updating metadata for person ID: $PERSON_ID"
        
        # Refresh person metadata
        curl -s -X POST "$EMBY_SERVER_URL/emby/Items/$PERSON_ID/Refresh?api_key=$API_KEY"
        
        # Optionally, you can wait a bit between requests to avoid overloading the server
        sleep 1
    done
    
    echo "Metadata update completed."
}

# Execute the function
update_people_metadata

Will test it out tomorrow to see if it actually works.

[Neminem 1518]

I just want to commend on my previous statement about short cummings, in regard  to search for people.

I have found a way to search for all people.

Example "A***" will search for all people with A in first name or surname.

But a search like "A**" will only provise 50 people.

Not sure if this is a bug or by design.

Since I guess a search "A" , "A*" or "A**" could borg down the server.

[CBers 7450]

1 hour ago, jaycedk said:

I just want to commend on my previous statement about short cummings, in regard  to search for people.

I have found a way to search for all people.

Example "A***" will search for all people with A in first name or surname.

 

How are you getting the PEOPLE option in your search results, as I am not seeing it?



Do you have an extra plugin installed?

What am I missing