Solved Thumbnail Path substitution on Marshmallow
#1
Hi Everyone. Has anyone here had any luck with using the Advanced Settings for the thumbnails path substitution since switching to Android 6 and Kodi 17?. In the past for both my Minix Neo U1's and even a couple of old MyGica's I had always put a 32 gb Sd card in the box and written an Advanced Settings file which I placed in my Userdata folder and they have always worked like a charm saving all the Thumbnails to the External SD card and not the Internal Card. I have written them to work for both regular Kodi 16 as well as the Minix-xbmc. Since switching to the new U9-H's which run on Android 6 Marshmallow and running Kodi 17 I have tried several different ways to get the Advanced Settings to work to no avail. I had always just put an empty folder directly on the External sd card such as 'kodi_data' and directed the Path Substitutions to that folder and it has always worked. Now to my understanding may not work in Android 6 because of permissions. It has been written that the folder on the external sd card should be in the Kodi's App folder. So I have instead put this folder and changed the Path Substitution to redirect to the kodi folder that the Minix automatical puts on the External SD card instead of the old path. Here is an example of some of the new Path Substitions that I have tried:
<advancedsettings>
<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
<from>/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/userdata/Thumbnails/</from>
<to>/storage/xxxx-xxxx/Android/data/org.xbmx.kodi/files/kodi_data/Thumbnails/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>
This is the path that shows up when going through the folders on my box using ES Explorer. The 8 x's are the external Sd cards id. Most of the available info for path substitution as well as my own were written for Android 5 or lower. Has anyone attempted the path substitution since switching to Android 6 Marshmallow and Kodi 17.1? And if so could you pass along what worked for you? Thank you
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#2
Hi, referring to the above post from last month. I am asking this sincerely, could one of the moderators possibly give me some advice to what may have been wrong with my question? Was it maybe too long, making it hard to follow? Was the topic something that is no longer discussed or something else entirely. I'm asking for advice so in the future I can correctly ask another question with the proper protocol. The reason I ask is because judging by all the amount of previous postings on the subject of Thumbnail substitution on Kodi 16 on older versions of Android (which had taught me how to write the path substitutions), I would have thought this would have been a topic that many people would have been trying to achieve on Kodi 17.1 and Android 6 and possibly running in to the same problems as I stated above. Thank you.
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#3
It's a Android limitation. As of Android 6 to write to external storage an app has to request permission. Kodi does not ask and so writing to external storage (non-adopted) from Kodi can't be done.

If you want to use your SD Card for Kodi, adopt it then you don't have to worry about path substitution.
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#4
Thanks much Tinwarble, yes I was afraid that may be the answer. I may do the adaption as you suggested. First I'll wait to see if the internal memory fills up with all the Thumbnails or not. Hopefully I won't need to do anything. Thanks again
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#5
Yes, it can be done. I put this advanced settings file in my userdata folder. The xxxx-xxxx is actually the 8 digit code of my external sd card. Did a reboot checked to see if it was repopulating to the external sd card and when I was sure that it was, I went back to my userdata folder and deleted the Thumbnails folder. My internal memory is now not being used up by all those thumbnails and all the thumbnails are now being stored on the external sd card. Kodi is still working and showing all it's thumbnails and icons as normal. Here was the advanced settings that I used:
<advancedsettings>
<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
<from>/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/userdata/Thumbnails/</from>
<to>/storage/xxxx-xxxx/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/Thumbnails/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>
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