Hi,
This post is just an FYI regarding an ongoing image purge over at TheMovieDB, which JRiver uses as a data/poster source.
TMDb is currently in the process of removing thousands of posters, backdrop and banner images from their site, both from movies and TV shows. This heavily impacts the quality/quantity of available posters when doing "Get Movie/TV Info", or when using MCRatings/MCUtils or similar tools to fetch poster art. Many movies now don't even have *any* English-language poster available.
I had a chat with the site owner (Travis) and he says they are not at liberty to discuss their reasons, but he strongly hinted at copyright/legal issues - basically, it looks like they're removing all images they might have acquired by scraping other sites in order to remove legal exposure. The removed images are actually still accessible if you have the URL, and they say they'll only remove them if they get a DMCA takedown request. But unless you already had the URL stored somewhere, it won't be possible to guess them.
You can see the Change list for any movie/show, listing the deletions by TmdbBot. It looks like the purge it still ongoing.
Some examples:
In Bruges - This had 40 posters and 7 backdrops, now has 11 posters/4 backdrops (and 3 of these were re-added after the purge)
Confessions of a dangerous mind - Had 24 posters and 15 backdrops, now has 8 posters/1 backdrop
Lost - 92 posters/backdrops/banners deleted so far.
Travis also mentioned that user-uploaded posters are fine (both existing and future ones) so let's hope the community can re-upload the deleted data quickly. TMDb is community-driven, so feel free to participate
Br,
Zybex
Author
Topic: TMDb purging thousands of posters/backdrops (Read 611 times)