[tiaderosa]

Hi
Thumbnails is a quite big folder for big numbers of movie collections. I have kodi 18.9 installed on my PC, tablet and FireTV. 

My setups run a central database located on my Nas. Since Thumbnails take a lot of room, that is a problem especially for FireTV. So I decide to move Thumbnails on my Nas as well.

Can I use only one Thumbnail folder on my Nas for my kodi's installations ?. I think I've red somewhere in the forum that this is not recomended as it can cause mulfuctions.
Is this true ?. If so why ?. What kind of mulfuction may I have ?.

I'm not an expert and I might be wrong but my understanding is that during the scrapring process the database are populeted with all movie info, links and  pictures are stored in Thumbnails folderes and they are referenced with paths stored in specific fields of the database.

So, in princiiple another istance of kodi with the same settings of Source can references the same pictures through the database. 
If this is the case, why the use of an unique Thumbnails is not recomended ?

[Klojum]

Somewhere in the past, Kodi developers deemed it best to have all thumbnails stored locally for the fastest access possible. This was mainly because of (then) low-powered Android-like and Raspberry devices. Poor wifi connections would also contribute to a less-than-desirable drops in GUI performance when all icons and thumbs were to be retrieved via a (wireless) network connection.

It is a possible to store thumbnails on a remote network location or NAS using path substitution. But, for reasons yet fully unknown to us, the user experience can vary. So it's basically a situation of "try and find out". It is best when all connected Kodi devices use the same network/file protocol when storing thumbnails. I use NFS for that, you may want to use SMBor something else.

Example:

xml:
<pathsubstitution>

	<substitute>

		<from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/</from>

		<to>/mnt/srvr/KODI/thumbs/</to>

	</substitute>

	<substitute>

		<from>special://profile/Thumbnails/</from>

		<to>/mnt/srvr/KODI/thumbs/</to>

	</substitute>

</pathsubstitution>