[pkscout]

Artist Slideshow 2.1.0 ALPHA2 Available for Testing
(note: there was no public Alpha1)

There is an early test release of AS available.  Because it's an early test release and has some substantial changes, it is not available via my beta repo yet.  If you want to try it, please go to the AS Releases page on Github.  You should use the installer zip and NOT the source zip.  Otherwise you'll end up with two copies of AS on your Kodi install.  Before installing this, I recommend, no implore, no BEG you to make a backup of userdata/addon_data/script.artistslideshow as well as the local artist image directory (if you have that setting enabled).  You must be on version 2.0.0 or later of AS to upgrade properly to this version.  If you're on something older it might work, but I doubt it.  I've included a suggested set of update steps at the end of this post in the hopes that some of you will read all the way through before upgrading.  '-)

The most significant upgrade for 2.1.0 is that AS no longer uses hashed directory or image file names.  That should make it easier for you to manually manage things if you want.  AS will run a one time upgrade routine to attempt to rename all the hashed folder names to the correct artist and rename the images to the original image download name.  Any artist information and image folders in the addon_data folder that can't be renamed will be moved to an archive folder in the addon_data folder so you can deal with them manually if you want.  Any empty directories will be deleted.

Other new features:

• There is a new setting in the slideshow settings that will force AS to always use the local artist folder to store images.  This should alleviate the need to use AS Helper to move artwork from the addon_data directory to your local directory and makes sharing images between Kodi instances much easier.  The first time you run AS after enabling this setting, AS will move any images in addon_data to your local artist folder with the correct directory structure (and extranfanart folder name).  AS will delete any duplicate image from addon_data.
  
• There is a new file called _imgdb.nfo that has a list of all files downloaded for that artist.  Once downloaded an image will never be downloaded again (unless you remove it from _imgdb.nfo or delete that file), so you can now delete files without having to worry about them being downloaded again.  That should help people who want to curate the images some.
  
• Each Kodi instance will still have it's own Artist Information folder, but an image won't be downloaded unless it is truly new (i.e. not in _imgdb.nfo).  Previously AS would download an image before realizing it didn't need it, so this should significantly reduce the strain on external image services.
  
• Because AS now uses artist names as folder names, fuzzy artist search is now permanently enabled, as all folders must have safe names.  By default AS uses the Windows illegal character list (as it is the largest), but you can change that in the settings if you want to.  AS replaces illegal characters with an underscore (_) by default and deletes any trailing period.  Both these can be changed in the settings.
  

Here are some things I've noticed so far:

• The folder renaming and archiving works, but I have a few directories that don't get renamed or archived.  It looks like they are duplicate artist names that for some reason had different hashes.  I think that likely happened as unicode support was added to AS, and you should be able to just delete any directories that don't get renamed or archived (or move them manually to the archive folder).
  
• Image renaming depends on having the original URL for the image download.  So anything from Last.fm or HTBackdrops won't be unhashed because neither service provides API based image downloads anymore.  Also, the API key for Fanart.tv changed awhile back, so you probably ended up with duplicate images if you've been using AS long enough.  Only the newer set of images will be renamed.  The old ones can be left alone or manually deleted.  Your choice.
  
• It can take awhile to get through a large library of folders and images.
  

OK, here's my suggested steps:

1. Grab the installer zip from the releases page.
   
2. Install it as you normally would for addons.
   
3. if you want to enable to forced local storage, go to the AS settings and enable that *before* you run AS.  You can turn it on later, but I think it's easier to do it all at once.
   
4. Enable Kodi debug logging AND AS logging (this will help if you run into a problem that I need to troubleshoot).
   
5. Go to the Program Addons area and run AS from there.  You won't get any feedback from AS, but you should be able to see the progress either in the log or by looking at your filesystem.
   
6. Once your sure it's done and it worked, disable debug logging for Kodi and AS.
   

If for some reason you need to run the upgrade again, you need to delete the migrationcheck.nfo and imagecheck.nfo (if you did the forced local storage) files.  That will force AS to run the upgrade routines again.

If you run into problems with the alpha (especially with the upgrade routines), PLEASE post a debug log.  That'll help me track down what's happening and try to duplicate the problem.