[gjwAudio]

Hi Milhouse

Thanks so much for the in-depth tutorial - I've read through 3x and my head is still spinning

Mostly from the "gee, I've made a mess here" line of thinking. Clearly I need a new set of Best Practices for handling my library.

Your point about repeated Exports degrading the images makes me want to nuke-em-all, and start over fresh. But I'm sure it's not that straightforward and pitfalls await around every corner ! Fortunately, it seems like only the movies class is affected.

If I understand correctly, I don't want to re-scrape the whole collection, just use your scripts to refresh the Artwork - and stay away from Exporting to Local (ie: overwriting full-res images in the movie folders with lower-rez versions from the Thumbnail folders).

How does this sound for a plan:

1) copy all my non-supported-movie-artwork (ie: everything but "-fanart" & "-poster") to a safe place. I can retrieve any custom things from there, once the re-downloading is complete.

2) do an "Xd" run to weed out orphaned database rows

3) do a "P" run to get out the cruft from the texture cache (heh-heh... love that word)

4) delete all artwork image files from the local folders (where the movie files live), in order to force the next step to fetch ALL NEW copies

5) run mklocal.py to populate the media folders with fresh, full-rez version of each artwork element

6) do a "set" run to point all database references to the local copies instead of http:// sources

7) scroll through kodi MOVIES collection to identify missing elements (principally -banner images)... retrieve missing files from offline backup (step 1)

8) do a "c movies" run to cache the homemade images (which should still be in the database from the manual "Choose art..." actions of the past)

I think that will get me to a good, high-quality-image state.

Comments and corrections are much appreciated. Thanks for playing...

ps: there are a few other considerations before pulling the trigger, but that can wait till the full light of day.