[Alanon]

It's a month later so you are probably one way or the other on this by now, but Artwork Beef will use the local artwork as the first selected, but if you have set the limit higher in the add-on settings then it should fill the rest from web services. Local artwork takes precedence to match scraper behavior, as one way to override the automatic selection. After you remove the local files, the next time each item is processed the images that were local files will be replaced with more images from web services.

A fadelabel control, I think that'll do it, you mad genius! I was wanting a way to do this without the plugin, but I just couldn't figure it out. The fadelabel may even be able to do what the `smartseries` plugin path is meant for, not resetting the displayed artwork when navigating from a series list to season list to episode list. Other than maybe that, I don't think you'll be missing much. I'll have to look into this, see if it could be turned into an easy to use include for skinners.

Artwork Beef won't add new movie thumbnails from web services. I'm still trying to leave all downloading and caching to Kodi, and I don't know of a simple way to control the size of artwork added this way, and Kodi's image resizer (from cached size to actual display in skin) doesn't produce the best result when greatly downsizing an image, so I don't want to just plop it right in at full fanart size.

PS I do too, but I thought that could be used to good effect for some series.

Yup, I figured it out in the end. I simply scraped the library again using beef exclusively, and left the local thumbs for good measure, and then forced a re-cache with the Texture Cache Utility. It's been working like a dream.

As for the fadelabel, I've been using it for a month, and when combined with some nice inclusions, the fadelabel even allows for rotation settings. For me, it provides a slightly faster experience than the smartseries. I feel as if there is a split second in the plugin call where there is a shadow while it gets triggered. The fadelabel doesn't have this, and you can even trigger it with animations as you see fit. However, I don't know why that won't work with the seasons and episodes. It seems that it simply wasn't built that way, and has to be bypassed somehow. From the skinning side of things, I'm looking to see if it's possible to invoke the series filepath or dbid, or something, when browsing the seasons and episodes. That would have the effect of freezing the fanart cycle as if it was perpetually focused on the series' title, whenever you enter to browse them, and would simply leave it in place. Not sure if that's possible, though.

As for the thumbs, I'm not sure, but all of the thumbs that are in my library seem to be either actual thumbs, or fanart images properly downscaled to 780x439. I'm a bit confused since I distinctly remember you being right - I've seen badly downscaled images from when fanart was downloaded as a thumb, but I simply could not find any examples of it in my library. Perhaps something was changed? I'm not a big fan of the things, but some views in my skin simply use them, and the only thing worse than using a bad thumb is using no thumb at all. I corrected it with using landscape, which helped a bit, but not fully. The best way to fill that void is definitely animated artwork, for me at least. In that regard, I have to echo the question of somehow downloading them properly or automatically. As it is now, they do not download automatically, but I presume that has more to do with the infrastructure available for them, and it's not something you can alter?

I also have a question concerning the artwork in the sets. How do you go about changing, say, the disc for a movie set? When I go and change it in Manage/Select artwork/discart, all I get are posters from the movies within a set, and a browse option. However, since all the images are in the cache, that's just not applicable in this case. I literally couldn't find a way other than manually downloading the new image, placing it in the local folder, and browsing to it. Which is too convoluted a process, IMO. Is there no way of going online and returning a list of discs? I would rather go through a list of all the discs for all of the movies within a set than nothing at all. Also, if I go to Manage/Select artwork to add, instead of getting an actual choice, I get random options for a different film. Again, not sure how much you can change, and how much is Kodi's inner workings...