Incorrect language tags in "Edit Images" dialog and unexpected backdrop selection

[brh150]

First of all, thank you for creating this plugin. I've been using it for the past few months, and it has been a huge improvement over Jellyfin's default image selection. It works really well overall, which is why I wanted to report what looks like a regression I've recently noticed.

Plugin's configuration

• Preferred language override: en
• Fallback language: en
• Also include the title's original language: disabled
• Put the original language last: enabled
• Posters: only use the original language (strict): disabled
• Allow textless (no language tag) images:
  • Posters: disabled
  • Backdrops: enabled
  • Logos: enabled
• Sort by vote count: enabled
• Minimum vote count: 0

Library's configuration

• Preferred download language: Polish
• Country/Region: Poland
• Image fetchers: Language-Aware TMDB Images - ranked first

Expected behavior

• Posters should prefer English images.
• Backdrops should prefer textless images when available.
• Images returned by the plugin should have the correct language tag (en or no language for textless images).
• The "All languages" filter in the image selection dialog should work correctly.

Actual behavior

• Posters are downloaded correctly in English.
• Backdrops are selected with English titles instead of available textless versions.
• In the Edit Images dialog, every returned image is tagged as the library's preferred download language (pl), even though the actual image is English.
• Textless backdrops are also tagged as pl instead of having no language tag.
• Textless backdrops appear after the titled versions, whereas they were previously listed first.
• The "All languages" option in the image search dialog has no effect.
• Changing the library's preferred download language also changes the language tag shown for all images in the Edit Images dialog. For example, changing the library language from Polish to French causes all returned images to be tagged as fr, regardless of their actual language.

• Jellyfin: 10.11.11
• Language-Aware Images: 0.8.1.0

[superuser404notfound]

Thanks for the very thorough report, it made this easy to pin down. There are actually three separate things here, and they split into one real gap and two by-design trade-offs.

1. Backdrops picking titled English over textless (fixed in v0.9.0)

You are right, this was a gap. Until now "Allow textless" only added textless images as a last resort, always ranked below the language buckets. With your setup (preferred en, fallback en) the titled English backdrop therefore always beat the textless one, and there was no way to prefer textless.

v0.9.0 adds a per-type "Prefer textless over titled" option. To get what you want:

1. Update the plugin to 0.9.0 (your server will offer it once it refreshes the plugin repo).
2. In the plugin config, under "Textless (no language tag) images", enable "Prefer textless backdrops over titled" (keep "Allow textless backdrops" on).
3. Refresh metadata on an affected title.

Textless backdrops will then rank first, above the English ones. It is per image type, so posters and logos are unaffected unless you enable their own Prefer option too.

2 and 3. Language tags in Edit Images, and the "All languages" toggle (by design, now documented)

These two are the deliberate cost of how the plugin guarantees its ordering, not bugs.

To make its bucket order survive Jellyfin's own downstream image sort and filter, the plugin tags every image it returns with the library's metadata language (pl in your case) and encodes the rank as a synthetic community rating. That has two visible consequences:

• Every image is labelled with the library language in the Edit Images dialog even when the artwork is really English or textless, and changing the library's download language changes those labels. That is the tag, not the actual image.
• The "All languages" toggle has no visible effect, because every image already carries the tag its filter keys on.

If the plugin tagged images with their real language instead, Jellyfin's downstream filter would drop everything that is not the library language or en, which is exactly the behaviour this plugin exists to avoid. So it is an intentional trade-off for reliable ordering. I have added a "Note on the image picker" section to the README so this is clear going forward.

Could you test?

Once you are on 0.9.0, could you enable "Prefer textless backdrops over titled" and confirm your backdrops now pick the textless versions first? If anything still looks off, the plugin logs its ranking decisions under the LanguageAwareImages prefix when Debug logging is on, and that output is very helpful.

Thanks again for the detailed write-up.

[brh150]

Thank you for such a quick response and the patch. It seems to be working!

1. I might be mistaken, but I think that in some previous versions of the plugin the textless images were indeed preferred over the titled, but as I said, I could misremembered it. Nonetheless, option to prefer textless images is a great addition. This definitely does the trick for me. Thank you.

2. Again, I might misremember things, but I don't think the library's language tag were shown before in the "edit images" dialog. If it's by design then so be it - it's not an issue for me. Thank you for clarification of how it works.