Artwork
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Template:Editor box An impressive feature of XBMC is its ability to display custom thumbnails (also known as an "icon") on most items displayed. You can assign thumbnails to folders, programs, music, videos, bookmarks, and of course pictures. You can choose to let XBMC automatically download thumbnails for music-albums and video/movies from the internet or you can create your very own custom thumbnails. You can also download custom thumbnails that others have created.
When talking about movies the terms "Cover Art", "Posters" (term used on TheTVDB) and "Folder Image" are all used to refer to the same thing we are talking about here. In the XBMC world Thumbnail is the generic term that encompasses all of those things, so don't get confused.
Note: Despite what the term Thumbnail implies, thumbnails in XBMC are NOT necessarily small images in terms of resolution or size on disk. A Thumbnail in XBMC can be a 800 x 1200 pixel image with a file size of over 300 Kilobytes for example, but typically thumbnails are restricted to smaller sizes than that due to performance concerns.
Folder Thumbnails
If you store each of your media files in separate subfolders to keep things organized, you can also make the folder have a custom thumbnail image. To do this you either need to save your JPG/PNG thumbnail as folder.jpg and place it inside your movie/album folder, or you can save it as <foldername>deprecated and place it at the same level as the folder in the directory tree.
Movies\path\foldername\ Movies\path\foldername.jpg or Movies\path\moviename\folder.jpg Music\path\album\folder.jpg Now your media folder will have a lovely custom thumbnail-image. You can via advancedsettings.xml change the default filename of the image that XBMC uses for music folders. See the <musicthumbs> tag. for more information. |
Music Thumbnails
Music Thumbnails are assigned as part of a multi-tier process. First, the Tag Reader runs and caches any embedded art using the album name and album artist (or song artist, if that is all that is available). If the album name or artist is unavailable, it is cached using the path name of the song. This assumes, of course, that you have tag reading enabled.
You can also use "Get Thumb" to download the album thumbnail from allmusic.com (AMG) for a specific album/folder or do a scan of all your music files in all shares.
Thumbnails also get downloaded when you rip AudioCD's to your XBMC device (which is described in the Ripping CDs section).
Recommended is that you store each of your music-albums or artists in a separate subfolder to keep things organized. You can also of course make the folder have a custom thumbnail image.
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The code which assigns thumbnails to files runs and assigns thumbnails in the following order:
- 1) Cached Album Thumbnail
- This is all the embedded album art read by the tag reader and cached using the album name and album artist.
- 2) Cached filename.jpg
- This includes an embedded thumbnail cached with the fully qualified name.
- 3) Remote filename.jpg
- This is a filename.jpg on a remote share/folder which is then cached.
- 4) Cached folder.jpg
- This is a folder.jpg which is cached based off the folder path.
- 5) Remote folder.jpg
- This is a folder.jpg on a remote share/folder which is then cached.
- 6) Remote foldername.jpg
- This is a foldername.jpg on a remote share/folder which is then cached.
Examples:
In this example audiofilename.mp3 will use audiofilename.jpg as thumbnail:
Music\path\audiofilename.mp3 Music\path\audiofilename.jpg
The same goes for playlists, cue-sheets, SHOUTcast, and internet-stream files, example:
Music\path\audioplaylistname.m3u Music\path\audioplaylistname.jpg Music\path\cuelistname.cue Music\path\cuelistname.mp3 Music\path\cuelistname.jpg Music\path\shoutcastlinkname.pls Music\path\shoutcastlinkname.jpg Music\path\audiostreamname.strm Music\path\audiostreamname.jpg
- Music fanart
Video Thumbnails
You can either use your own custom thumbnails or XBMC can retrieve video thumbnails from the internet via scrapers and cache them locally.
XBMC applies thumbnails to video files in the following order:
- 1) Cached Thumbnail
Thumbnails are cached to UserData\Thumbnails\Video using the CRC of the path of the file or folder.
- 2) User-Defined Thumbnail
For files:
XBMC looks for <filename>-poster.(jpg/png) in the folder containing the media files and uses that as the thumbnail. Note: <filename>.jpg will supersede <filename>-poster.(jpg/png) (result of Eden backward compatibility)
The thumbnail is cached the first time it is read.
For folders:
XBMC checks inside the movie folder for the following files in this order:
- <filename>-poster.(jpg/png)
- poster.(jpg/png)
- folder.jpg
For TV series specifically:
The same rules apply regarding file naming conventions and by default XBMC will look for folder.jpg for BOTH Posters AND Banners despite the fact that the naming convention might seem counter intuitive in the case of Banners.
Note: Deprecated as of Frodo <dvdthumbs> is no longer part of advancedsettings.xml - Again, you can use the <dvdthumbs> element in advancedsettings.xml to override the default thumbnail file name that XBMC looks for to make things more meaningful for TV series. If, for example, you prefer to use Banners you would probably want to set the <dvdthumbs> element in advancedsettings.xml to remove folder.jpg from the search filter and add banner.jpg to the search filter as follows:
<dvdthumbs><remove>folder.jpg
Note: TV series:
There is a special case with TV Series where, if you choose to use Banners as your primary thumbnails, you also need Posters in some areas of the UI depending on which skin you are using.
The Aeon Nox skin, which is extremely popular, has a very nice View mode called BannerPlex for example. If you are using that View as your TV Series View, your primary thumbnails for your TV series will be Banners BUT there are still places where you need to supply a Poster, like the "TV show information" screen that is accessible from the context menu for a Series. In that screen you need a Poster image for the big area on the left that takes up a third of the screen. By default the Banner thumbnail that XBMC imported will be stretched vertically to fill that area and it looks horrible.
As of Frodo, XBMC will import Banners and Posters.
For this reason you should NEVER name your primary thumbnail images poster.jpg and you should NEVER modify the <dvdthumbs> element in advancedsettings.xml to make it search for variants of poster.jpg.
Effectively, you should consider the file name poster.jpg to be a reserved file name in XBMC that is used specifically to solve the Banner / Poster combo issue as described further below.
Certain skins, like Aeon Nox, typically provide an option in the settings for the View itself that allows you to explicitly stipulate that a poster file should be used for those areas where a Poster type image is applicable.
In Aeon Nox, the setting is on the slide out menu on the left of the screen when you are viewing your series. If you have the BannerPlex view activated and you slide out that menu, then go to
"Viewtype settings", then look under "GENERAL OPTIONS", you will find an option labelled "Use 'poster.jpg' for poster style viewtypes". If you turn that on, then any poster.jpg that you have in your folders
when you import your media from disk will be used where a poster type image is appropriate.
Note: However, that regardless of any settings, poster.jpg will NOT be used as the All Seasons image. For that you MUST provide a season-all.(jpg/png) file. A quick workaround to this problem is to copy an existing poster.jpg file and rename it to season-all.(jpg/png). That will actually work and import fine.
Picture thumbnails
Kodi will generate thumbnails for pictures and folders in the pictures area using the following methods:
- Images
- EXIF thumbnail in JPEG images are then read. If no EXIF thumbnail is available, XBMC will load the image and generate a thumbnail from the image. These are then cached.
- Folders
- <MyHolidayPictures>\folder.jpg is checked first. If that file doesn't exist, XBMC will generate a thumbnail from up to 4 random images inside that folder.
Thumbnails for file sources
You can change the thumbnail displayed for a file source by bringing up the context menu (menu or C) and selecting "Choose thumbnail".