Is there a way of clearing the 'video add-on' thumbnails? The thumbnails appear to go into the same place as library thumbnails and that makes removing them difficult. Because the video add-ons are generating thumbnails everytime you use a video add-on, the thumbnails location just seems to get bigger and bigger with no way of saving space. I just wondered if there is a solution to this?
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=158373
Is probably what you're looking for.
Quote:[p, P] Prune texture cache by identifying (p) or removing (P) accumulated cruft such as image previews, previously deleted movies/tv shows/music whose artwork remains in the texture cache even after cleaning the database. Essentially, remove any cached file that is no longer associated with an entry in the media library and is therefore just wasting disk space
Just upping this as my kodi-backup is over 1.5gigs despite only really being a few hundred megs, the rest appears to be made up in old thumbnails generated from using video add-ons. Is there a straight forward way of removing them so that I can backup kodi without having all of those unneeded thumbnails included? I have in the past just deleted the thumbnail dirs 0-9/a-f but it broke the system as it deleted icons, favourites, library art etc and I couldn't find a way to rescrape them. All I really want to do is get rid of thumbnails that have been generated for streaming videos via the video add-ons but I just can't see of a straight forward way of doing it. Manually going through each thumbnail isn't really an option.
The only other thing I can think of is a complete reinstall from scratch then reinstall add-ons and import library. But if I do that is it possible to also import the favourites (that come up when you click the bottom left icon on the kodi main screen) including thumbnails? I really don't want to lose favourites which is what puts me off a whole new fresh install.
I did look at the above link but I don't think it specifically does this type of thumbnail removal, I'm not quite technically down with it either tbh.
It's not particularly subtle, but...
Delete the thumbnails folder and the textures.db file in userdata/databases.
If you just delete thumbnails the textures.db is pointing at non-existent images, which is what you saw before.
Edit: you can test this by renaming them (thumbnailsold/texturesold/whatever), start kodi and you'll see they're both replaced and your images should work - if slowly, because they'll need to be re-cached. If everything's tickety-boo delete the old stuff.
trogggy - What you suggested worked! Thanks so much, been struggling to find a solution to the thumbnail issue for years. Now I have a kodi backup that is less than 100megs rather than the 2.2gigs it was before due to unneeded thumbnails created over the years.
Thanks once again for your help.