Jellyfin

Is your library huge? If it’s not you can manually replace images for a single artist by going 3 dots-refresh metadata-check the box that says replace images.

Can also do the 3 dots but click “identify” instead of refresh metadata and type the artist name into the artist name box, then select the result that matches and check the replace images box, but this is just a longer way of doing the above (or a way of linking the artist to a different musicbrainz id if you want to override what the scraper did)

Can also do the 3 dots and select “edit images”. Then can either browse for local images via the folder or hit the magnifying glass and search. This can be worth a try - sometimes jellyfin metadata gets fucked up. I’ve had success with stuff like this by just changing a single image (eg searching for a new artist image) then backing out to home, refreshing the page a few times, and going back to the artist. Then all of sudden the poster and summary text are correct again because the db entry was messed up and just changing one image forced it to update.

If your library is like mine (very large) this is all very impractical. It may be more efficient to simply delete the library and recreate the share. You’ll lose play counts and such, so that sucks. Sometimes it helps to go to scheduled tasks and run clean up jobs after you remove the library and before you recreate it but it’s usually not necessary. I found that I had to recreate my library several times at one point to fix serious issues, but then read on to where this stopped being the case and I had to just delete jellyfin and start over. Thankfully this probably doesn’t apply to you unless you were fucking around with metadata references intentionally like I was

Jellyfin metadata for music is a mess, imo. I’ve had a lot of problems with it. I don’t like how there’s no way to make any override in the db for album artist tags. My music is all tags with beets.io (similar to musicbrainz Picard) which follows musicbrainz guidelines religiously and thus I have a lot of music that’s like artist, artist featuring artist b, etc in the album artist field and directory structure.

It’s fine that jellyfin imports it this way but there is absolutely 0 support to override it. Like I should be able to say that the parent artist “artist” refers to the directories “/artist/, /artist ft x/, etc” as well as music tagged with the same artist structure so that albums by artist and artist ft x just show up under one category: artist. Maybe in the future, oh well, open source, such is life

what’s more frustrating and the reason I post this is that if you mess around with this (like I did) you will potential find some ways to make it work but none of them will reliably work, they will all lead to problematic behavior (albums disappearing, art getting stuck and messed up in ways that even the above won’t solve, etc). This is whatever except the second solution does not fix it. You can nuke your entire music library and recreate it after doing this and it will come back to haunt you. The flawed references stay in the db for some reason. I’ve posted about it in the forum but the devs don’t really post there much, especially about music shit, so no one really replied and aside from a moderator who was polite and did seem to want to help (but didn’t seem to be able to, unfortunately) the thread just died with no real response.

Tldr if you want to condense your artists just retag your music because trying to do it in jellyfin will fuck things up so bad your only resolution will be to delete jellyfin and start over from a fresh db