Kodi Community Forum

I may be in a fairly niche situation, but in my setup the artwork caching feature which is apparently built into core Kodi is a significant problem.

I have just set up Kodi on CoreELEC running from an SD card in a TV box (Beelink GT King), to showcase my large collection (16,000+) of 4K photographs as a shuffled slideshow, with music as background (I am using pkscout's Artist Slideshow). I set the Kodi GUI to 4K, so no image rescaling is needed. As querying 16,000 file names from the original source (an SMB folder on the local network) takes too long (94 seconds), I copied the images to the Kodi's SD card (now it takes ~3 seconds to start slideshow). The fact that Kodi always caches my artwork (stored on the same SD card) is a problem for a few reasons:

 - My SD card will have a limited lifetime (I keep writing ~gigabyte and more of cached images every day, only to delete them to clear space).
 - My images are re-encoded one more time, and I have no control of the quality of the re-encoder.
 - Caching slows things down.
 - I definitely don't need caching for this, as the sources are either on a local gigabit network, or on the same SD card as Kodi.

Any chance artwork caching can be optionally disabled in Kodi, perhaps only inside addons? I'd love to be able to display my photos as is, without re-encoding and caching.

+1 on this option for me too please. AdvancedSettings will do.

+1, I personally care about the performance of caching.
I get why Kodi caches for perfomance issues, but at least there should be an option to disable re-encoding during caching.
Kodi is doing nothing wrong, re-sizing and re-encoding should be there and Kodi should do it.
But... for us poor souls who have decided to re-encode and re-size our artwork for achieving better perfomance in caching there should be an option to disable re-encoding during caching.
If my artwork is in the compatible format Kodi wants and in the resolution Kodi wants (meets criterias of imageres and fanartres advancedsettings) there should be an option in adnvancedsettings to just copy the file and not re-encode it.
It would speed up caching tremendously for us, having to re-encode about 30000 images (a typical library has) vs just copy the files to Thumbnails cache...
In my scenario, I even pay for optimizing my artwork with services like tinypng, the cached images in Kodi are even bigger in size than the originals because of re-encoding.