Kodi Community Forum

Well, the subject states it:

I have a Kodi Database with attached storage (NAS) shares - a long time ago, I had to export/import databases, and had to do that using the "export to multiple files" option, then re-import from there.

The only issue I had with this is, that my media folders were (obviously) spammed with jpgs, nfo files etc. etc. which made the folders almost un-navigatable by normal PC browsing, so I wished to remove
all the files again, as I expected them to be "imported" to Kodi texture cache as they would have been with online artwork... so I removed everything. And now (silly me) almost all my movies are missing
posters, fanart etc... and the only way to get them back is the tried and true "refresh every single movie / series manually" approach, as that replaces the local URLs with online ones, but you can't force that
on the whole library without doing a rescrape, which would kill a lot of my manual edits (wrongly scraped stuff) and lose me the watched status entries... I also thought about just removing the (now empty-pointing) local
URLs from the Database directly using SQL, but that would be no good, as that would just leave it without an online URL and still not pull any fanart in... another Idea I thought would be to export (again) to multiple files,
delete the database, (set the advancedsettings import watched state flag), delete all the locally exported jpgs/pngs, and THEN re-import the database again so that it pulls all the info from online again...

anyone have a better Idea for what I'm planning to do? If it matters, it is a NAS-based setup with three KODI-machines using centralized MySQL storage. And no, keeping ANY files besides the .mkv / .avi / etc. in the folders is not acceptable. For that reason, I can't use Artwork Downloader for example...

I think deleting just the images and then importing from the NFO files should work. Assuming the NFO files have online URLs and if they still work.

Well, that is the Question Ned - how would I get NFOs with online URLs? If I export my DB from Kodi as-is I'm pretty sure it would include the still-broken offline URLs in the NFOs... I want to keep my library as it is now, including watched flags, manually corrected entries etc, but just re-download all the artwork into the kodi thumbs database, NOT in the folders as with artwork downloader... It can't be that this is so obscure that no-one has ever done it?

Like I said before, manually refreshing every movie by hand (which is equivalent of rescraping the whole library, I know - it even deletes the watched flag if I noticed correctly) does what I need..but for >1000 entries that is not possible, and to recreate the whole DB including the manual fixes (not so bad) and the wateched states (almost impossible) can't be a serious solution either?

There's an option in Artwork Downloader to overwrite all artwork with online URLs. That will of course ignore anything you have ever set. After you can export your database to NFO.

Not sure if this is what you want.

Martijn, thanks, that sounds like what I want - I never set local artwork deliberately, these are all just fragments from an earlier export where the images were fetched online before - I'll check what you said!

Hello Martijn,

your suggestion worked - thanks!

I was thrown back initially because the "Addon Info" (at least in German) states that for Artwork Downloader to work you need every Movie in its own Folder - this is why I never tried it, as I don't have my setup this way.
(This might also be the reason why I always assumed Artwork Downloader can only download the Artwork to the Sources as separate files...)

This post can be closed down if needed!