Erratic Movie Artwork

Hi James. Yes it chooses the first one, but my posters never use to have all that kind of text on them, that’s why I liked infuse, it was plain and simple.

Yeah, generally the top rated posters are the best ones, but due to the reshuffle at TMDb there is a bit of a lag on new/updated posters getting voted on and rising to the top.

It looks like a new top-rated poster has been selected for Alexander (Alexander (2004) — The Movie Database (TMDB)), so if you give it a few hours it should be available in Infuse (you will need to use the Edit option and reselect the title to pull down the new artwork).

As mentioned above, we hope to add a poster picker in a future update which will make this process a bit easier.

That is what I did last night. Went through all my movies that had weird posters, logged into the movie database and upvoted the one I wanted and downvoted the others. And a few cases I had to upload a new version that didn’t exist anymore so that I could vote that specific one. All but a handful of cases I got the poster I wanted which matched what they used to be. And a few cases I actually like the other poster better.

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I wanted to say I’m glad other people are having the same issues as I am, so I don’t feel alone in my frustration, but we shouldn’t be having these issues.
I’m also getting non-English titles, and yes I checked tmdb and the problem is there, not with infuse.
My question is why is infuse connected with this site that can’t keep proper metadata?

In general, it has been fine. It is just now when they went through and clean things up after years of user uploads and things. They have been going through a major website redesign currently as well. It is not like this is a regular thing and if they do it again infuse will have it stored in iCloud anyways so it won’t be a problem

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+1 and things as a whole are looking better but it’s not unusual to see glitches when you’re in a growth mode. Also just to clarify a bit about the iCloud storage, Infuse will be adding the ability to store the artwork in iCloud in an upcoming 6.4.X update. That’s a best guess but it’s not available yet and you can keep track of it here Upcoming Features (updated 12/11/23) (I know munpip214 tracks this, the link is for those who may not know about the features coming post :wink: ).

I’ve done a purge and most movies are good now. A few show just white squares instead of a poster or a movie frame. On my iPad these movies do have artwork. Some of the miniature images are still random frames instead of a nice picture, and somehow one of the 3 Godzilla collections doesn’t show up in the collections view, but does show up in the regular movies view.

It sucks that TMDB now has some movies showing foreign titled posters.

While I find Infuse excellent I find it odd that its reliant on 2 databases and the fact that there’s no warning built in saying “image update, yes or no” or even keeping what you’ve built up. Mine has just updated on my ATV and iPad and lots of them are rubbish.

If you read above you’ll see that unfortunately this happened at the same time the infuse was rebuilding their image cache code thus just really bad timing. Normally infuse doesn’t refresh posters for everything.

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If I choose to delete the metadata on my iPad, what happens to the manual corrections I made, because infuse fetched the wrong movie?
What happens to the metadata synced to iCloud and therefore to my other devices?

If you have iCloud sync on and then do the clear metadata in the Infuse settings you correction should be saved to iCloud and it should rebuild your library. Your iPad will download the text metadata and corrections from iCloud and then re-fetch the artwork from the proper sources.

Hello, I’m new to Infuse, I’m using it on AppleTv and iPad. I’m following this thread for the last two days, because I’m having almost the same issues.
I noticed that the posters changed, and some were displayed with images from the movie itself. So I decided to delete all metadata and run the fetching again. Now all posters seem good to me, but I’m having troubles with the fan arts (the “backdrops”, as mentioned on the Tmdb site). These backdrops are only displayed in Infuse when you select a movie and you’re viewing your iPad in portrait mode (in landscape mode, the poster is displayed). And on Apple TV, these are displayed when you’re inside a collection, you can see them at the bottom. But unfortunately, the backdrop is not the good one. I checked on Tmdb, and all seem to be ok… For example, With the movie “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”, the backdrop displayed is the Portuguese one !? Another example, with “Jack Reacher: Never go back”, the backdrop is the German one !!?
I’m French, so everything is configured to be French (only for the metadata because I watch everything in original version with French subtitles), so I should see the French backdrops. And they exist on the Tmdb site (for captain America only, jack reacher has only German, and no language, which should be the default choice in this case anyway)

So maybe there is something wrong with Infuse concerning the backdrops ? Or maybe there are internal changes (or errors?) with the backdrops on the site ? I don’t know…

Sorry for my english, I’m french and don’t practice my english very often ! ?
And sorry for the looonngg post (and the first one haha)

Btw, Infuse is great !! ?

As everyone is noticing these issues they are going and trying to fix them. There will probably be quite a few changes happening with artwork over the next month, I imagine. Also, there is a delay between when it is reflected on the site vs when it is available for Infuse to download it.

I lost a lot of artwork. So I decided to spend Saturday curating my collection. It took a few hours, but I decided the best option where I had films without posters was to hunt down a poster on TMDB and store it locally as folder.jpg. This meant being able to rationalize posters into similar styles (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, for example) which previously threw up a mass of conflicting styles. In the end I am pretty pleased with the end result.

But clearing metadata revealed some issues: Infuse can’t distinguish between Airplane 1 and 2, GOTG 1 and 2, and can’t recognise Hellboy 2 (by which I mean it requires manual metadata editing). Nor can it recognise the Johnny Depp Alice in Wonderland. It thinks Hero (2002) is the Last Action Hero, even when the .mkv and folder both contain “(2002)”. Age of Ultron is mysteriously not recognised. X-Men (2000) gets classed as X-Men:The Mutant Watch (also from 2000) and X2 comes up as Men In Black. Big becomes Big Hero 6 even though Big is listed further down the metadata list. And Cold War (2018, Polish) only gets recognised if you edit the metadata and type “Zimna” (the first half of the Polish title). Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging produces a poster in Bulgarian; What a Girl Wants produces a poster in Spanish.

Some of these are TMDB issues, and obviously so. But some seem to be reflective of how Infuse draws data from TMDB, or perhaps reads data on TMDB.

I went through this issue around February. I was in Mexico and only had a very slow connection, my meta-data file is one gigabyte took all day to download everything. Now it’s happened again where I’m lost half my artwork so I agree with those who are a bit PO’ed. I thought at that time the solution was that all the metadata would be synced to iCloud. Seems that’s the same for this failure.

Addition I lost the watched and unwatched data so I had to go back through and manually correct on that. Very very frustrating

Also a lifetime subscriber

If you have a library where more than a handful of titles are affected you can use the Clear All Metadata option found in Settings, and Infuse will get the latest posters for your entire library. This process is entirely automatic, and in most cases will only take a few minutes.

This is true only for English titles. I have hundreds of Chinese/Korean/Japaneses movies, they have localized posters before, now these localized Posters all disappeared on Tmdb, after cleared metadata cache, Infuse downloaded only English Posters. I had to correct them one by one – find localized poster, upload to tmdb, upload to NAS. It is very painful process, it could be avoided at beginning if recent versions of Infuse didn’t delete cached Posters when Posters do not exist on Tmdb.

James … this is NOT a problem with tvdb (although there are clearly some issues after their stupid updates recently) this is a problem with INFUSE … telling people to repopulate the DB is simply daft … in my case that will take over 18 HOURS on EACH of my ATV’s !!! …Anyway I have been doing some testing and resolved that the issue seems to be that YOUR recent update (tested by your normal “beta” testers who only obviously have 3 films on their boxes !) have MISSED that fact that it is INFUSE that will NOW NOT RECOGNISE my own “Folder.jpg” … Take (for example) Adam Adamant (1966) - I have a root folder Called Adam Adamant with my own Folder.jpg downloaded from thetvdb - all good and recognised. Next - inside the root folder I have another 2 Folders (Series 1 & Series 2) and in them I have “Folder.jpg” again downloaded from thetvdb … BUT here is the thing, Infuse now REFUSES to see and recognise this .jpg and instead replaces the image on screen with a video grab. I have tried EVERYTHING to force it see MY graphic - but it will not. The SAME issue applies on other TV progs (not all of them) and also some FILMS. I have even recompile the database on one of my boxes to see if that fixes the issue - (18 hours later !!! - which is does UNTIL I go to add something to a folder and then it reverts back to the issue described above. Clearly this has something to do with a badly tested latest update meant to load custom folder graphics quicker but instead has disabled being able to FORCE the custom graphic telling Infuse to IGNORE any tvdb graphic missing or otherwise.

To be fair to James and Infuse, it has been the case for as long as I can remember that TVDB acts differently to TMDB.

As far as I know it has never been possible to have infuse recognise a locally stored folder.jpg image that is the the same directory as a particular season of a TV series. A jpg for a collection of seasons in the “parent” folder should be fine, but not an individual season.

Local TV seasons artworks worked with very specific naming convention.

  1. folder.jpg didn’t work for seasons.
  2. you need to name season artworks (season folder name-post.jpg) and place them in the right place (under seasons folder),

for example:

/Westworld/
    - folder.jpg 
    - /season 1/
        - season 1-poster.jpg
        - westworld.s01e01.mkv
        - westworld.s01e02.mkv
        - ......
    - /season 2/
        - season 2-poster.jpg
        - westworld.s02e01.mkv
        - westworld.s02e02.mkv
        - ......
    - /season 3/
        - season 3-poster.jpg
        - westworld.s03e01.mkv
        - westworld.s03e02.mkv
        - ......

Thank you! I did not know that…

ETA: I’ve been using this to tidy up some inconsistent artwork. It works - mostly. However…

  • rarely will infuse recognise the folder.jpg in the top level directory.
  • mostly it will recognise a season n-poster.jpg in a season directory, but not always. For example, Spiral (2005; a French police drama) - it won’t. It will stubbornly default to the first season images on trakt, which are inconsistently designed, and the one for S3 looks like a bad screen shot (that image appears as the second listed one on tvdb). If anyone knows how to adjust the image rankings on trakt, I would love to know.