TMDb posters: no language fallback + Person bio missing after bulk refresh

[lianqq 0]

Note: This is likely a server metadata/TMDb logic issue (not Linux-specific). I’m posting under Linux only because that’s my deployment platform (Docker).

Environment

• Emby Server: 4.9.3.0

• Install: Docker emby/embyserver:latest (LAN only)

• Metadata/Image provider: TMDb

• Library: Movies + TV Shows (includes JP/KR titles)

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Issue 1: Missing posters when Preferred image download language = English (no fallback)

Summary
When Preferred image download language is set to English, most items fetch posters correctly, but some items (movies/TV, especially JP/KR) end up with 0 posters (grey placeholder). This seems to happen when the title has no en posters on TMDb.

Example
JP title: TMDb tv id: 215197 (I have multiple affected titles; can provide more IDs if needed)

Steps

• Set Preferred image download language = English

• Refresh metadata/images for the affected title

• Check “Edit Metadata → Images”

Actual

• No Poster images available (empty remote results), UI shows placeholder.

Expected (fallback behavior)

• If en posters are available, download en posters.

• If en posters are not available, automatically fallback to posters matching the TMDb title’s original_language (e.g. ja for JP titles, ko for KR titles), instead of returning 0 posters.

Notes

• Changing Preferred image language to Chinese and re-refreshing causes posters to appear for those same titles, suggesting the image query is language-filtered and currently has no fallback.

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Issue 2: Person (actor) biography missing after bulk refresh until manual refresh per person

Summary
After library/bulk metadata refresh, some Person/Actor items are created but biography/overview is empty. Manually opening an actor and clicking Refresh usually fills the bio immediately.

Steps

• Run bulk “Refresh Metadata” on a library

• Open cast/actor pages

Actual

• Some Person bios are empty after bulk refresh.

• Manual per-person refresh fetches bio successfully.

Expected

• Bulk refresh should reliably populate Person bios, or at least queue/retry missing Person records (rate limit/timeout handling + retry/backoff), so manual per-person refresh is not required.

Notes

• After changing Preferred metadata language from “Chinese (Simplified)” to “Chinese” and re-refreshing all metadata, Person bios became consistently populated (possible language-code mapping issue or missing retry on bulk path).

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Request

• Add fallback logic for TMDb image language filtering when preferred language returns 0 posters (fallback to TMDb original_language).

• Make Person bio fetching consistent between bulk refresh and manual refresh (retry/backoff + consistent language mapping).

If you need logs, tell me which log level/fields to capture and I can provide server logs around the refresh operations.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, we plan to add fallback options in future updates.