I guess this applies to video content too, but that's less important (one file, one picture, simple). But for music it's a bit more complex, particularly when all the content is shared with iTunes which stores artwork in a separate, convoluted folder structure and in a format that's not readily usable.
So, in iTunes all my music has artwork. Most is in iTunes Album Artwork folder structure and hence I would guess, inaccessible to Plex. The rest (very little) is embedded in the music files. What will Plex do when I 'import' all this music?
I realise it can go off trawling the 'Net to find what it thinks it suitable, but I don't want it to do that. I have all the artwork needed and it doesn't need to waste the time and bandwidth trying to find it all again. What will it do with embedded artwork? Does it extract the image and store that somewhere just once for the album, as iTunes does but hopefully with a more understandable folder structure. Or does it store the images in the database?
What about iTunes downloaded artwork? I'm guessing it won't be able to do anything with that, correct?
I also maintain my own gallery of artwork, in a folder structure that mimics that of the music files themselves. Each image is named cover.jpg, or some other identifiable name when there's more than one image (like front.jpg, back.jpg etc). Every album though has a cover.jpg stored in its 'mirrored' folder in the gallery.
I set this up so I could merge both directories (Music and Gallery) and MythTV would see the combined result and will use any appropriately named image file in the album's folder and that's what it sees. However, I cannot merge them like that on the Mac where Plex Media Server will be running.
So...:-
Where does Plex store the Album Artwork images?
How can I tell Plex to grab any artwork it wants from the appropriate Gallery folder.
Or
Can I just place my artwork images from the Gallery into the structure that Plex uses to store images and it will automatically use them, rather than having to search the 'Net, find and download what is likely to be worse than what I already have or simply wrong?
Finally, can Plex correctly store and display an image for the overall album and different images for each disc in the set? This is not common, but a lot of box-sets do this. Can Plex deal with that, or is it simply one image per album and that's it?
Ok, another one:-
What about Artist artwork? Where is this stored (if available)?