[jfroy]

Using Kodi Remote on iOS to drive Kodi Nexus (20.2) on macOS Monterey. I have been seeing some missing album cover art in Kodi Remote for quite a while, despite all images showing properly on macOS. I tried recreating the source, rebuilding the music database and entire thumbnails folder, deleting and reinstalling Kodi Remote on iOS. This has made the situation worse: I now see all album covers in Kodi on macOS, but none in Kodi Remote on iOS. Album cover images are either embedded in FLAC, AAC or MP3 media files, or in a cover.jpg file in the same folder as the album.

Another forum post recommended trying the Chorus interface (http://localhost:8080) on the same computer where Kodi is running. I can see my music there, but no album covers. The post suggested this may be a metadata access issue, but did not provide any solution. Can anyone help diagnose this?

[izprtxqkft]

https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=193

[jfroy]

Here is the thread I was referring to: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...ng+artwork

As recommended in the last message of that thread, if Chorus interface doesn't show images either, then there is a common root cause that is not iOS-specific. Hence this post in the general forum.

[Buschel]

This does not seem to be an issue of the iOS Remote App as the same happens with the Chorus web interface. This should be moved to an appropriate place.

[Buschel]

@kambala, is there anything specific on macOS (Monterey) which can cause the cover images to not be readable from remote or web interface? To me this sounds like something not working as intended on the Kodi side.

[Buschel]

Using Kodi Remote on iOS to drive Kodi Nexus (20.2) on macOS Monterey. I have been seeing some missing album cover art in Kodi Remote for quite a while, despite all images showing properly on macOS. I tried recreating the source, rebuilding the music database and entire thumbnails folder, deleting and reinstalling Kodi Remote on iOS. This has made the situation worse...

While testing with Kodi 20.2 I just encountered the same after deleting the thumbnail folder and recreating some picture thumbnails. This finally messed up the thumbnails for many other items as well, resulting in several thumbnails not being loaded via JSON API properly. I could resolve this by removing the complete .kodi folder (not sure where this is located on MacOS), not only the thumbnail folder. Then redo the scanning, and everything works as expected. Looks like a database / image cache / scanning problem of Kodi 20.2 to me.

Edit: It seems it is enough to remove the file ~/.kodi/userdata/Database/Textures13.db and restart Kodi. Now the thubmnails should be rebuilt on Kodi side and show up in the Kodi Remote app again. You need to clean the cache of the app once via selecting this in the app's settings and restarting the app.

[Buschel]

@jfroy, again thanks for motivating us to look into this issue deeper. Changes have been applied to both Kodi Nexus (will be part of 20.3) and Omega which will let Kodi recreate the missing thumbnails when a read request comes from a Remote Control app or Chorus web interface.

[jfroy]

@Buschel, thanks for the feedback. I attempted a few manipulations to rebuild my media database with little success, but I think this has allowed me to identify a possible root cause. I have a music source with two paths, and I got to a point where Kodi Remote shows album images for albums under only one of the two paths, whereas Kodi itself shows images for all albums. It turns out the other path (the one for which Kodi Remote shows no album art) contains a symbolic link. I see the same results in Chorus. Would you be able to confirm whether this is something Kodi Remote and Chorus actually support?

[Buschel]

The Remote / Chorus just place a command to Kodi and do need any special treatment. All of this is handled inside Kodi itself. We need to get some from the Kodi team to comment on this.

Just asking: You updated to Kodi 20.3 or you kept 20.2 but deleted the texture file?

@Neo1973, can you possibly comment on this?

[jfroy]

Didn’t take the 20.3 upgrade yet. Will do.

[jfroy]

I confirm that 20.3 does not solve the problem for me.

[Buschel]

It turns out the other path (the one for which Kodi Remote shows no album art) contains a symbolic link. I see the same results in Chorus.

Could you share more details about this? What exactly you use the symbolic link for, for artwork?

As a side note: I am using symbolic links on my Linux test server for all movies, videos and episodes to save storage space. This works without any issue.

[jfroy]

I originally had a symlink as the root for all media files, to allow redirection to a different volume (I use removable storage routinely to carry media files to other locations and computers). Album covers are either embedded in the media files (.flac, .aac, .mp3) or included as a cover.jpg file in the album folder, alongside the music files for that album, so the path to the cover art is the same as that to the media files for every album.

At one point, I tried rebuiling the db from scratch again, but this time using absolute paths (bypassing the root symlink) in the source definition. That helped, but one of the two paths in my source points to a directory that contains symlinks to artist or album folders. So even if the path itself doesn’t contain any symlink, the directory structure it points to does. Kodi traverses those symlinks without any trouble for scanning, playback, and for scraping local cover art. Not so, it seems, when providing thumbnails to Kodi Remote.

Do I properly answer your question?

[Buschel]

If I understood correctly, you have:
- non-symlink for your music source folder
- symlink is used for some subfolders inside this source folder
- symlinks point to folders which hold non-symlink files
- art is embedded in the audio files (I do the same) or as cover.jpg along with the audio files in the same directory

I will give a try on my test systems (Linux).

@kambala: Would this be any problem on MacOS?

[Buschel]

I tried to set up a simple album scan without embedded metadata and could not sort this out. I now gave up after 30 min. Maybe someone else can look into this.

This topic should be moved to the JSON section of the forum as it not only impacts the iOS Remote, but at least also Chorus Web-IF and therefor most like is a generic problem.