[Andrew Bienhaus]

Good day,
I've been digging and reading, searching and trying the various tools & scripts listed, to restore missing artwork from files in Kodi.
Seems to be only movies, in my case.

There was a time, sometime in the v17-18 range, that there must have been some scraper bugs, or, that the database got confused, and as a result I just get the movie camera icon on a bunch of titles.
(doesn't matter if on windows or android, and seems to happen across multuiple devices that are sharing the same movie file server)

Before I dump the whole database and start from scratch... is there anything that will actually work, to walk through the DB, find the ones that are missing, and re-acquire them while recording that in the DB?
The latest thing I tried was the Artwork Downloader Matrix version script, and while it seemed to do a lot of work, and dumped more and more files into my movie server (a fanart & poster for every movie) the operation and display within Kodi didn't change at all.

I'm sorry if this seems like a dumb newb question - it just strikes me that there might be an advanced tool somewhere, or a process I would be able to trigger - that might clean this up?

If I pick a single movie, choose refresh and allow it to "ignore local info, go to web and refresh"... it confirms the movie, and then brings in and keeps the correct artwork - every time.
So I know Kodi is capable of correcting the problem...?

Open to thoughts, or threads, that I maybe haven't found yet. Many thanks in advance. :-)

[Andrew Bienhaus]

For anyone else who reads or is looking for this, here's what I seem to have had success by doing:

For the record, I had no local artwork in the folders, and no NFO files with the movies/shows.

v19.3  (same behavoir worked on windows and android-firestick)

installed Lanik repo, google it.
it will give you Kcleaner - which I let clean and compress. Most talked about purging old thumbnails, so not sure if related or coincidental.

Then, in settings, media, library, Videos
select whatever you have (I have one for movies, and one for TV), and right-click-choose edit source.
Hit OK on the first screen with the paths, and it will go to the second screen, where it asks you about what is in the source... don't just hit ok yet to that one.
Make a change, and then change back to what you had, and then hit OK. (I changed scraper, and then back to what I had)

That way, it asks you if you want to re-scan existing content... which if you say YES to, does what I wanted to do.

It LOOKS like it is purging the database and re-scanning, and takes a long time, but when it was done, I had all the movie backdrops/posters, the new mini logos, etc.
And, my play counts and other stored details were still with each movie.

When I did it for TV shows, it worked too. Remembered which episodes had played and not, etc.
The only glitch I had, was that the TVDB (new) scraper, mis-processed one show, but I posted about that in the other forum. :-)

Hope that helps anyone else!
Andrew

[Karellen]

For the record, I had no local artwork in the folders, and no NFO files with the movies/shows.

You should keep local artwork.
The information provider sites mass delete excess artwork on an irregular basis. Using local artwork prevents you from being affected by these deletions.
Install Artwork Dump to download local artwork during the scraping process. Be sure to set up your Movie Set folder also.