[DaveBlake]

Probably nubie stupidity, but music library thumbnail and fanart is not behaving in the way I expected (or as described in the adding music to library wiki). I am ripping my CD to FLAC with Vorbis tags using EAC, not Kodi ripper, and my files are stored in NFS on a NAS drive in Music>Artist>Album>Track.FLAC structure. In Kodi "update library" to load the files into the music library, and the music all plays fine.

Here's the thing: If I embed an album thumbnail in each FLAC then it automatically gets shown for the album (and tracks), no image for the artist. However if I don't use embedded art, but put an image in the album or artist folder file then I get no images anywhere. I have tried naming same as folder or file, tbn as well as jpg, locating within and at same level as the artist or album folder but they don't show. What am I doing wrong?

At artist level I have managed to manually scan for "artist information" and get some lovely fanart appear, but not the images I have stored on my drive. Inevitably there are some artists that can't be found that way, and I had thought all I needed to do was put an appropriately named jpg in the right location along with the Flac files and Kodi would use it. Is that incorrect?

[DaveBlake]

Yeap, partly stupidity and misnaming folders. If I don't embed images in the FLAC files, but do put an album thumbnail in a file called folder.jpg in the album folder along with the tracks before Kodi loads it for the first time then I get the album image. Just can not make using a <filename>.jpg file work, it seems to have to be folder.jpg.

However once loaded I don't seem to be able to replace the album image. I can change the files on the NAS drive but updating the library does not change the album image. How can I get Kodi to forget any album image mistakes that it has cached and load something new? Likewise how to get it to load an album image if when first loaded into the library there was neither embedded images nor a suitably named file in the album folder?

[scott967]

Yeap, partly stupidity and misnaming folders. If I don't embed images in the FLAC files, but do put an album thumbnail in a file called folder.jpg in the album folder along with the tracks before Kodi loads it for the first time then I get the album image. Just can not make using a <filename>.jpg file work, it seems to have to be folder.jpg.

However once loaded I don't seem to be able to replace the album image. I can change the files on the NAS drive but updating the library does not change the album image. How can I get Kodi to forget any album image mistakes that it has cached and load something new? Likewise how to get it to load an album image if when first loaded into the library there was neither embedded images nor a suitably named file in the album folder?

You can change the specific filename in advancedsettings.xml, but not something like "this_album-cover.jpg".

You can change the current image by opening the album info dialog (focus on an album and use keyboard "i"). Note that the album info dialog is only available if the album has been "scraped". Otherwise you get a popup to use the current album scraper to find the album. "Get thumb" (as called in Confluence) allows to use any scraped online art or browse for local art.

I think it also works (haven't tried though) that you can create a compilation album where each song would use its own embedded album cover art and you could also have your own "album" cover for the compilation.

scott s.
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[DaveBlake]

Thanks Scott, I misunderstood the wiki to mean that I could use artist_folder_name.jpg in artist_folder for artist or album_folder_name.jpg for album, but it is clearly wrong. It has to be called "folder.jpg" inside the album or artist folder accordingly. But would <track file name>.jpg work for a specific track thumbnail rather than embedding? I also note that Kodi does support embedded images in FLAC contrary to the wiki.

Where I run into trouble now is if I have the wrong images, or none, when the album and artist are loaded by Kodi into the music library, and the artist is not found by the music scraper. Then I get into a loop of dialog asking for manual name etc. never getting to the popup. What is the best way from there?

I have blundered around and sometimes the album and/or artist thumbnail has appeared but mostly the only way forward seems to be to remove the artist and tracks from the NAS drive, clean the library, update the library (to ensure no sign of artist), put the artist & album back on the NAS drive with the correct folder.jpg files for artist and albums and finally update the library. A right palava! Is there a better way?