emby keeps generating thumbnail for TV Shows Library folder of shows deleted months ago

[ramansgdeep 4]

The home screen of the web interface has a My Media section which lists various Library folders and one of them is TV Shows. Each folder has a thumbnail collage image of the random 4 items in it. The generated collage for TV Shows folder on my device are of shows that have been deleted months ago, and since then the computer has been restarted several times, emby has been shut down and restarted several times, the library has been manually refreshed several times, the thumbnail image has been manually deleted from the options quite a few times. Deleting the image, just regenerates another version of it with other deleted shows. How do i fix this?

[Luke 42528]

HI there, can you please provide a specific example?

How to Report a Problem

Thanks !

 

[ramansgdeep 4]

Thumbnail of TV shows library on home screen. This thumbnail is a collage of shows that it portrays as being part of the current library.


The actual current shows in the library.

The shows in the thumbnails have been deleted months ago, the library has been re-scanned many times since, the server has been restarted many times, the computer has been restarted many times. I have manually deleted the thumbnail pic via mouse hovering > three-dot menu > Edit images > Primary > delete. (the thumbnail is the primary image). Deleting it removes the thumbnail and makes it blank. It regenerates another collage afterwards after a while. The new thumbnail is of other set of deleted shows.

Actual folders on device.

Settings of the library pointing to the folder.


Do you also want server logs?

[Neminem 1734]

Known issue been around as long as i know.

And really annoying.

I have given my folders custom pictures that I made

 

 

[ramansgdeep 4]

23 hours ago, Neminem said:

I have given my folders custom pictures that I made

damn! I don't wanna be keep doing it every single time!

[yocker 1593]

Don't know if it will help but my first thought would be to try and delete the cache in Emby.

[ramansgdeep 4]

On 5/19/2026 at 12:36 AM, yocker said:

Don't know if it will help but my first thought would be to try and delete the cache in Emby.

been there, done that. unfortunately it doesn't help.

[yocker 1593]

4 hours ago, ramansgdeep said:

been there, done that. unfortunately it doesn't help.

In Emby-Server\programdata\metadata you will find all the posters that Emby has saved.
I would suggest not just deleting the folder as i don't know what will happen but maybe deleting the posters will work.

Again i don't know, but i would guess if you delete the wrong poster that you can just refresh metadata.

Remember to make a backup!!  

[ramansgdeep 4]

15 hours ago, yocker said:

In Emby-Server\programdata\metadata you will find all the posters that Emby has saved.
I would suggest not just deleting the folder as i don't know what will happen but maybe deleting the posters will work.

Again i don't know, but i would guess if you delete the wrong poster that you can just refresh metadata.

Remember to make a backup!!  

I went to the metadata location and found that files with the name of `auto_poster_[Number1]_[Number2]_[Number3]_[Number4].png` are the library hero images that we are talking about. Each number is an identification for an individual item trickling down to its respective primary image. I could delete all these images to force emby to generate new auto-posters to test if the bug lies here in the non-deletion of them but I'd rather not risk testing this workaround only to lose this data (referrring to the old and now-defunct library hero images) which could be used to actually fix the bug in emby itself.
 

Here's a screenshot of me finding a total of 67 auto-poster images with the oldest one dating back to 02-08-2025. I'd appreciate if a dev could take a look at this @Luke

[Luke 42528]

There was an issue in an older version of the server not cleaning those up. Newer versions of the server will delete the file once it is no longer used, however it won't go and clean up all of those older ones.

So for any given folder, I would think it should be safe to delete all of them except for the newest one.

[Luke 42528]

Hi there, please attach the Emby server log from when the problem occurred:

How to Report a Problem

Thanks!