Kodi Community Forum

I use Kodi mostly for the Youtube addon, to be able to use it with the gamepad.

I browse Youtube with it daily and i noticed that it stores all the video thumbnail pictures in the "Thumbnails" directory.

All these pictures are useless to me though. 99% of the time i'm only going to view a video once and never need to look for it ever again or create a library. But as i browse, more and more random thumbnail pictures get saved all the time on my SSD.

Sure, i can always manually delete them but they still ware out the SSD with the constant saving. So, is it possible to stop the caching altogether?

While I think your concern about wear on the SSD is bit OTT, this is still an interesting question.  I'll bet there's a way to fudge this such as mangling the permissions on the Thumbnails folder, creating a file called Thumbnails etc but a proper "NoCache" mode would actually be quite useful for devices with absurdly low storage such as Firesticks.

Unless there is such a mode already, you can either use one of the above fudging methods or just set up a Path Substitution so your thumbnails get written off to another location/network share.

any attempts to block kodi from accessing its thumbnails folder will only result in kodi not being able to start - at all

use the path substitution method that was recommended by @beeswax

AFAIK, to display any art, it must be loaded from the thumbnails.  You could mod a skin to show no art, but in the case of youtube addon I think it always pulls an art (there's a resolution setting but no "none" option) and that gets stored in thumbnails.

scott s.
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Thanks for the suggestions.

I changed the thumbnails folder location and i guess i'll continue to manually delete the files every now and then.

(2023-05-16, 17:34)Imgema Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for the suggestions.

I changed the thumbnails folder location and i guess i'll continue to manually delete the files every now and then.

How about a cron job or a Kodi shutdown script to delete them ?


Thanks,

Jeff

You might have a look at texturecache.py python script.  It doesn't seem to be maintained any more but might work for this: 158373 (thread)

scott s.
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