Some movies never use local poster image

[billcw 2]

This has been bugging me for a while.  I only use poster.jpg files for my movie posters.  I have downloading posters disabled.  Most movies work as expected and immediately pick up the local poster, but some never do.  I can manually go into each movie and "Select image file", uploading the poster from within the folder and that works, but eventually I will do an upgrade or a rescan or something and all of those movies will go back to a blank poster.  And the only way I know to fix them is to go manually upload the posters again, which is tedious.  What am I doing wrong?

This is what it looks like:

Now, if I upload the poster.jpg file within the American Wereworlf in London movie folder, it works, as you can see.  It just can't find it on its own for some reason.  I have tried moving the folder elsewhere, rescanning, moving it back, and rescanning again, but it still doesn't find the poster.

Here is what the American Werewolf in London folder contains:

Ownership and permissions are the same for the poster.jpg file as for the movie files (664).

I just can't figure out what is different about the movies that don't work.

[billcw 2]

OK, so I think I did figure out something that is special about these movies and that led to a discovery.  This is an old library and I've changed files and settings a lot over time.  One change that I made was to remove leading articles (a, an, the) from the movie folders.  So, "An American Werewolf in London" became "American Werewolf in London".  But I didn't change the filenames within the folders, so they are still "An American Werewolf in London".  It turns out that, if I change the filenames to match the folder "American Werewolf in London (1981) - 1080p FQ.mkv", etc., then Emby picks up the poster.jpg.  So, I guess I could solve this problem by doing a mass file rename.  But, do I have to do that, or is there a better solution?

[billcw 2]

I wrote a little script to compare the file names in every directory to the directory name and report mismatches.  This corresponded exactly with movies that were missing posters.  So, it appears that the directory name must exactly match the part of the movie file name before the first dash for Emby to correctly use a local poster file.  I'm not sure why that should be the case, but at least it is predictable.  I went ahead and renamed all the files, so my problem is solved.  It still seems like this is probably not the way Emby is intended to work.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Sort of the previous existing rule for your multi-version example for all the content to use the same images.

Movie Naming | Emby Documentation

Quote

Each version must begin with the folder name, followed by " - ".

I can assume you have image downloading disabled as you would probably see images per version if you did.

[billcw 2]

Yes, but I think that is the strange thing.  If the folder name and movie file names are inconsistent, Emby will happily download a poster.  It will only use a local poster named poster.jpg if the folder and file names are consistent.  So, apparently it isn't a problem to have a divergence between folder and file names unless you want to use a local poster.  I can accept that that is just the way it is, but it doesn't make any sense to me.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, can you please provide an emby server log from starting up the server?

How to Report a Problem

Thanks.

[billcw 2]

Sure thing.  Attached.  I removed the networking section.

embyserver.txt

[Luke 42077]

Is this only happening with multi-version movies?

[billcw 2]

Probably.  I have multiple resolutions for every movie.

[Luke 42077]

OK yes I'm pretty sure that is the reason. we'll take a look at it. Thanks.