[bartmans]

I have latest LibreElec (9.0.0 with Kodi 18 release) runnning on a RPi3B.

When browsing pictures performance is so slow that browsing isn't possible.

Solution according to this forum is not using the thumbnail preview. And indeed, speed improves dramatically.

I then looked at other options, ie. generating thumbnails on my Windows 10 system and letting the Pi use them instead. But sharing of thumbnails and library is not advised on this forum.

The advice given seems to be: don't use slow hardware. But over on the music and video sections I can share my library via MariaDB and use a faster system to scan the libraries. So why (from a user perspective) looks the picture dbase to be different?

Two questions:
- is this an accurate depiction of the situation? Or am I missing something?
- can the sharing thumbnails feature be added to the backlog? I (for one) think this is good functionality to add.

[Klojum]

So why (from a user perspective) looks the picture dbase to be different?

Kodi does not have a picture database. All is done via the source's folders.

Videos and music files have bitrates, and the files are being streamed. They are reeled in via little chunks of data. A photo is one big blob that needs to get through the (network) door in one go. And the larger the picture is in size, the difficulty for an RPi rises.

- can the sharing thumbnails feature be added to the backlog? I (for one) think this is good functionality to add.

No. At this time, thumbnail sharing via 'path subtitution' is not actively supported.
Using "pathsubstitution" can work mostly on network shares without password protecting, but overall it still is a YMMV-situation.

Alternatively, you could scan/cache your entire collection(s) on your PC, and then copy the PC's thumbnail folder and Textures13.db file to the Raspberry Pi. But that is kinda the last resort.

[bartmans]

Okay, clear. From other threads I gather using path substition is a slow way to certain pain so I am not going to do that.

Idea: the slowness occurs when I want to view pictures because Kodi only then makes the thumbnails. Maybe an option to manually kick off making the thumbnails (so it can run at night)? Or to schedule such an update daily or weekly?

My Pi is on all the time so has plenty of room to compute when we're not using it. And there are a lot of slow devices out there.