Plex-Meta-Manager: Unable to remove overlays

I’ve never seen the case you describe where PMM, while setting overlays, only sets the overlay label on some of the items. I have seen a limited issue on a fixed set of items in a library when attempting to remove labels. In my case, it was always the same few movies. I haven’t seen a general problem adding or removing labels. The reason I described it as mysterious is that it’s not a common problem and apparently doesn’t have a repeatable recipe. It could be a database issue, or a PlexAPI issue, or a Plex issue. It’s mysterious in that it has an unknown cause and can’t be reproduced at will.

I respectfully disagree. Right now you rely on a field within Plex (also a database) which is easy to manipulate within the Plex web interface. This also opens up the opportunity that Plex doesn’t properly set the flag or remove it for whatever reason, and there isn’t much you can do about that.

Any solution has tradeoffs, it’s true. Ultimately it’s up to the author to make any changes he sees fit.

More experiments today, and I think I’ve found a problem and a solution for this edge case. I could only make it happen by forcing it, so it’s likely that the initial situation arises due to some bug or other, and I can’t reproduce or explain the “only applies overlay label to some of the items” scenario.

Basically, the “problem” is that the reset_overlays: tmdb operation doesn’t get applied to items without the “Overlay” label, so here was what I did to recover in my test library:

1. empty the backup images directory for the library, if there’s anything in there.
2. manually apply “Overlay” label to everything in the library
3. run with reset_overlays: tmdb. Now everything got a new poster with overlays applied and the backup images are all non-overlaid.
4. From here, if you want to remove all overlays, do a run with remove_overlays: true, then remove the overlay section from your config.
5. if you want to adjust the overlays [like getting rid of the 1080p overlay], edit the config as usual, remove the remove_overlays: true, and run PMM.

I’m planning to write this up with all the screenshots and configs I just saved and will post that here and in the discord.

Another option outside PMM would be to remove all the “Overlay” labels from everything and run the reset_posters_tmdb.py script from the repo I linked above.

There’s a brute force way to do just the artwork reset here: https://github.com/chazlarson/Media-Scripts

In my experiments,

- reset_overlays: tmdb

Has always grabbed new artwork from tmdb and reapplied appropriate overlays. if the overlay config no longer includes the 1080p overlay, it won’t be applied to the new artwork.

- reset_overlays: plex

In my experiments has been more hit-or-miss in that sometimes PMM seems to be unable to get new artwork from Plex.

Ordinarily, just removing an individual overlay from the config is sufficient to remove it

For example, going from this:

libraries:
  Movies:
    metadata_path:
    - pmm: actor
    - pmm: genre
    overlay_path:
    - pmm: ribbon
    - pmm: ratings

to

libraries:
 Movies:
   metadata_path:
   - pmm: actor
   - pmm: genre
   overlay_path:
   - pmm: ribbon

And rerunning PMM would remove the ratings overlays without any reset/remove/reapply required.

I didn’t intend to say this was your fault. Just providing an example scenario in response to “I can’t understand why the overlays get doubled in the first place”.

Chances are this was all initially triggered by some bug or another, but resetting to tmdb artwork has always worked for me.

I’ve wrote on the discussion section about a similar problem. With those options theoretically pmm should reset the overlay to the plex default one (the reapply gets ignored, if I understand correctly from the code). The problem is the fact that on my instance not all overlays get removed. On some movies/shows/season/episode the overlay remains the same as before (in some cases with a double overlay in different position, like the OP, if I have moved them for testing). I can’t understand why the overlays get doubled in the first place, then there’s the “can’t delete them” question also.