Having the hardest time getting the Collections feature to work right

[EmberAsh 1]

I just recently switched over to Emby as my primary library management, paid for lifetime sub because it blew Plex out of the water, etc, but now I'm having some real frustrations with Collections. My library has grown to the point where I need more efficient organization, but my collection thumbnails are not generating properly. They're just blank folder icons, or in one case, random images I neither chose nor desired that have nothing to do with the contents of the collection. I searched around regarding this problem, and found past threads from this forum with advice that no longer seems to work. Someone once said to "Delete the Collections library" in order to fix thumbnail generation, which is no longer possible? I can delete my other libraries, but not Collections. I deleted every single Collection from inside of the Collections library to fix this, and I still can't delete it. Making new collections, refreshing metadata and choosing to replace images, does not fix the problem. Further confusion is caused by the fact that users have seemingly been encountring this issue for the past 9 years, and so there are some absolutely ancient threads about it. Seems to be a bug that has faded and resurfaced multiple times over Emby's development.

Can anyone help me get collection thumbnails to work properly in 2024? No sooner had I paid for the lifetime license than I ran into this problem. On my first install on a different machine, collection thumbnails worked fine, just last month. Having a bit of buyer's remorse. The whole reason I bailed on Plex was because of persistent, unfixed bugs over years, which eroded my relationship with the product. Makes my heart sink to get this license and then find threads from 2015 discussing the very same problem. Seems like others got their Collections working, but not using any common solution.

[Abobader 3464]

Hello EmberAsh,

** This is an auto reply **

Please wait for someone from staff support or our members to reply to you.

It's recommended to provide more info, as it explain in this thread:

Thank you.

Emby Team

[Happy2Play 9781]

9 minutes ago, EmberAsh said:

I deleted every single Collection from inside of the Collections library to fix this, and I still can't delete it.

This is normal as once created it does not automatically hide when Empty.

But you really need to go over a specific example as I can only guess you are talking about dynamic images vs provider images.  Along with log and Collections library settings.

11 minutes ago, EmberAsh said:

Can anyone help me get collection thumbnails to work properly in 2024?

I have no idea why people say this as it has worked for over 8 years.  Unless this is just an AI response as it is happening way to often.  Or first timers that do not post all required trouble shooting information.

Not seeing a issue though.

[EmberAsh 1]

Wow, that was an impressively unhelpful response. I don't understand what your intention was behind making it? First off, I'm dealing with this bug, not you, so the state of your library is completely irrelevant. That's how bugs work. I am experiencing--as I already stated with crystal clarity--a failure to properly generate collection thumbnails. As of when I posted this thread, none of my 10 or so collection thumbnails were displaying properly, so specific examples didn't seem relevant. I had it work on a different PC, where the collection is automatically represented by several thumbnails from media within the collection, so that's clearly what's supposed to happen. Now, I'm getting the most inconsistent behavior. After having deleted all my collections and made this thread, I remade two of my collections, and one thumbnail ("Cheese" in the attached image) suddenly works (displays thumbnails representing the collection contents), while the other does not.

Also, why in the world would an AI make a bug report? I wouldn't have expected trolling to be an issue on a support forum, but your response reads like a troll to me. If you don't have anything helpful to contribute, please move along, thanks. Don't mean to be rude, but hours of troubleshooting have been frustrating enough. There's a whole internet out there for you to poke at, if that's your thing. I intentionally used the SEO (search engine optimization) phrase "in 2024" to help other people who are currently struggling with this problem and searching the internet for answers like I did. If you've seen the phrase elsewhere, maybe that indicates that lots of people are searching the internet for solutions and finding only old/irrelevant threads.

For devs/anyone who is actually here to help, the attached image should hopefully clarify my current state of affairs. Also, the forum threw a vague "upload failed" error when I tried to upload my embyserver.txt with my initial post, but I was able to attach to this response, so that is included as well.

 

embyserver.txt

Edited July 31, 2024 by EmberAsh

[Happy2Play 9781]

Quote

I just find it hard for users in 2024 to actually read and provide troubleshooting information.  Instead just come here with canned responses as it is 2024 and why does it just not work?

But it comes back to Provider lookup as sometime your random name will get results from provider making it Wrong, as Cheese does not exist and Emby create dynamic image but Animated returned result and not is something it actually is not.

2024-07-31 15:26:54.078 Info TheMovieDb: MovieDbProvider: Finding id for item: Animated
2024-07-31 15:26:54.078 Info HttpClient: GET https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/collection?api_key=‌f6bd687ffa63cd282b6ff2c6877f2669‌&query=Animated&language=en-US
2024-07-31 15:26:54.196 Info HttpClient: GET https://api.themoviedb.org/3/collection/263525?api_key=‌f6bd687ffa63cd282b6ff2c6877f2669‌&append_to_response=images&language=en-US&include_image_language=en-US,null
2024-07-31 15:26:54.312 Info HttpClient: GET https://api.themoviedb.org/3/collection/263525?api_key=‌f6bd687ffa63cd282b6ff2c6877f2669‌&append_to_response=images

As for My Media Collection library image does not always change and my need to be delete and perform a library scan to regenerate.

 

[Happy2Play 9781]

May need to disable provider if you make custom collections that get wrongly identified otherwise you will have to provide manual interventions.  As TMDB can return extremely wrong results in their querys.

[EmberAsh 1]

I see what you're saying. I do understand the frustration of dealing w/ bug reports containing inadequate data, or those having been made without searching for past threads first. Thanks a ton for your last two responses... That's just the kind of information I was looking for. I thought collections were entirely custom entities and didn't realize that they used image fetchers and metatadata downloaders just like other libraries. It seems like disabling those outright might solve my problem. I'll give it a shot now and mark your response as the solution if I am successful.

[EmberAsh 1]

Okay, I've disabled the providers as specified, and now I'm back to the blank folder behavior, as seen in the latest attached image here. This is after deleting the entire collection and recreating it from scratch. Strangely, the Collections library image has now repaired itself. Rescanned my library and attached another log.

embyserver.txt

Edited July 31, 2024 by EmberAsh

[Happy2Play 9781]

And the content of Animated Collections?

[EmberAsh 1]

3 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

And the content of Animated Collections?

 

[Happy2Play 9781]

Nothing stands out.  Have you done a library scan or a scan on the collections?

But dev may have to comment as this does not look right.

2024-07-31 16:36:25.051 Info App: Removing item from database, Type: BoxSet, Name: Animated, Path: , Id: 14590
2024-07-31 16:36:25.060 Info App: Deleting path C:\Users\xeemo\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\programdata\metadata\collections\Animated
2024-07-31 16:36:25.113 Info Server: http/1.1 Response 204 to ‌‍‍::1‌. Time: 67ms. POST http://‌‍‍localhost‌:8096/emby/Items/Delete?Ids=14590&X-Emby-Client=Emby Web&X-Emby-Device-Name=Google Chrome Windows&X-Emby-Device-Id=7516b2a5-30ed-436e-9043-b75170fc1c7b&X-Emby-Client-Version=4.8.8.0&X-Emby-Token=‌fbd1efc7de7648839c35a259342f800e‌&X-Emby-Language=en-us
2024-07-31 16:36:25.117 Info App: Sqlite: 284 - automatic index on LastWatchedEpisodes(SeriesPresentationUniqueKey)
2024-07-31 16:36:40.627 Error Server: Error processing request
	*** Error Report ***
	Version: 4.8.8.0
	Command line: C:\Users\xeemo\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\system\EmbyServer.dll
	Operating system: Microsoft Windows 10.0.19045
	Framework: .NET 6.0.30
	OS/Process: x64/x64
	Runtime: C:/Users/xeemo/AppData/Roaming/Emby-Server/system/System.Private.CoreLib.dll
	Processor count: 12
	Data path: C:\Users\xeemo\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\programdata
	Application path: C:\Users\xeemo\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\system
	MediaBrowser.Common.Extensions.ResourceNotFoundException: MediaBrowser.Common.Extensions.ResourceNotFoundException: Resource not found. Type: LibraryItem, Id: 14590
	   at Emby.Api.UserLibrary.UserLibraryService.Get(GetItem request)
	   at Emby.Server.Implementations.Services.ServiceController.GetTaskResult(Task task)
	   at Emby.Server.Implementations.Services.ServiceHandler.ProcessRequestAsync(HttpListenerHost httpHost, IServerApplicationHost appHost, IRequest httpReq, IResponse httpRes, IStreamHelper streamHelper, RestPath restPath, String responseContentType, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
	   at Emby.Server.Implementations.HttpServer.HttpListenerHost.RequestHandler(IRequest httpReq, ReadOnlyMemory`1 urlString, ReadOnlyMemory`1 localPath, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
	Source: Emby.Api
	TargetSite: Void MoveNext()
	
2024-07-31 16:36:40.627 Info Server: http/1.1 Response 404 to ‌‍‍::1‌. Time: 1ms. GET http://‌‍‍localhost‌:8096/emby/Users/a5476e17f429444b91e63f6f657bc9f3/Items/14590?Fields=ShareLevel&X-Emby-Client=Emby 
Web&X-Emby-Device-Name=Google Chrome Windows&X-Emby-Device-Id=7516b2a5-30ed-436e-9043-b75170fc1c7b&X-Emby-Client-Version=4.8.8.0&X-Emby-Token=‌fbd1efc7de7648839c35a259342f800e‌&X-Emby-Language=en-us

2024-07-31 16:36:47.679 Info Server: http/1.1 POST http://‌‍‍localhost‌:8096/emby/Collections?Name=Animated&Ids=3188&userId=a5476e17f429444b91e63f6f657bc9f3&X-Emby-Client=Emby Web&X-Emby-Device-Name=Google Chrome Windows&X-Emby-Device-Id=7516b2a5-30ed-436e-9043-b75170fc1c7b&X-Emby-Client-Version=4.8.8.0&X-Emby-Token=‌fbd1efc7de7648839c35a259342f800e‌&X-Emby-Language=en-us. UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
2024-07-31 16:36:47.682 Info Server: http/1.1 Response 200 to ‌‍‍::1‌. Time: 4ms. POST http://‌‍‍localhost‌:8096/emby/Collections?Name=Animated&Ids=3188&userId=a5476e17f429444b91e63f6f657bc9f3&X-Emby-Client=Emby Web&X-Emby-Device-Name=Google Chrome Windows&X-Emby-Device-Id=7516b2a5-30ed-436e-9043-b75170fc1c7b&X-Emby-Client-Version=4.8.8.0&X-Emby-Token=‌fbd1efc7de7648839c35a259342f800e‌&X-Emby-Language=en-us

As the initial delete failed.

Edited July 31, 2024 by Happy2Play

[marriedman 85]

Maybe I am reading this wrong, but are you using the Collections ability as a substitute for Tags or Genre?  In your Animation example, I see no obvious similarities that would constitute a collection. Certainly nothing that IMDB or TVDB would define as such.

I make extensive use of custom Collections, however I completely disable Emby from scraping anything from the Internet and prefer to do all of my metadata management from TinyMediaManager or MediaElch.

 

[marriedman 85]

Grabbed a quick couple screenshots of my genre and tag views to better exemplify what I am referencing. In this example I have my personal tags for movies. If I haven't chosen an icon for the tag yet, Emby just makes a collage image:

Same thing goes for Genre. I can make up whatever genre I want (e.g. Film Noir, Halloween, and Mockumentary):

Any movie can be associated to multiple tag's or genre's. I don't know about multiple collections though.

[GrimReaper 4740]

9 minutes ago, marriedman said:

I don't know about multiple collections though

Yes, an item can be a part of multiple collections (both auto- and custom ones). 

[EmberAsh 1]

9 hours ago, marriedman said:

Maybe I am reading this wrong, but are you using the Collections ability as a substitute for Tags or Genre?  In your Animation example, I see no obvious similarities that would constitute a collection. Certainly nothing that IMDB or TVDB would define as such.

I make extensive use of custom Collections, however I completely disable Emby from scraping anything from the Internet and prefer to do all of my metadata management from TinyMediaManager or MediaElch.

 

Since I deleted all my collections trying to resolve this issue, my screenshots don't represent how I'm using collections. While I did make a "Comedy" collection for easy access to funny stuff, most of my collections were things like "Most Rewatched" or "Studio Ghibli". I'm confused, though, why it would matter what a collection contains, or what it's named, once I've turned off all metadata downloading features for collections. The purpose is organization, isn't it? Should it not be up to the user to decide how they organize their library? I am consistently not getting thumbnail collages as Collection icons, but rather blank placeholders with a simple folder icon, as seen above. I suspect Happy2Play (thanks for all the help, btw) is correct, and dev input is needed

[Happy2Play 9781]

Will have to do some testing in 4.8.8.0 as only image issues I have seen were in beta releases prior to 4.9.0.28.  But every custom collection I have made Emby has generated a dynamic image for.