Album art for Plex, Jellyfin and Navidrome

The folder layout that works everywhere

All three servers expect one folder per album, containing that album’s tracks and its cover image. A layout of Artist / Album / tracks plus cover.jpg is understood by every one of them without configuration.

cover.jpg is the safest filename because all three recognise it. If you are standardising a library, use that and nothing else — mixed conventions across folders are the usual reason some albums show artwork and others do not.

Where each server differs

Plex prefers its own online metadata by default and may override a local image with one it fetched. If your local covers are being ignored, the relevant control is the library’s advanced settings, where you can tell it to prefer local metadata.

Jellyfin reads local images readily and accepts cover.jpg, folder.jpg and poster.jpg. It generally needs no persuasion beyond a rescan.

Navidrome checks embedded artwork and local files, with the order and accepted filenames configurable — the default covers embedded images plus cover, folder and front. It is the most forgiving of the three about naming.

When the cover still will not show

The most common cause is caching, not a wrong file. Every one of these servers stores generated thumbnails, and adding an image to disk does not invalidate them on its own. Trigger a library scan, and if that fails, refresh the metadata for that specific album.

The second most common cause is the image sitting one directory too high — placed in the artist folder rather than the album folder. The server looks in the folder that actually contains the audio files.

Third is a filename mismatch, usually a stray extension like cover.jpeg or Cover.JPG on a case-sensitive Linux filesystem.

Common questions