[pkscout]

It’s a pity I make extensive use of similar artists images in my skin, so I was wondering whether it would be possible to use as a source the names and images of other artists in your local library that share the same genre, instead of lastfm... would that be feasible?

Thanks!

There are three potential paths I can take to try and restore this functionality.  None of them look particularly easy, so it'll probably be quite awhile (if ever) before I get to it.  Note that it isn't just artist thumbnails but also album covers for last.fm stuff that has to be dealt with.

1- Use the artist or album image that Kodi already has stored for local artists and albums.  That's fine if you happen to have the artist or album last.fm is returning, but you'd still have no images for anything else.  I don't like that inconsistency, but at least it looks like I might be able to do it using the Kodi JSON API.

2- Drop last.fm support and try and rebuild similar artists and album list using only local Kodi db information.  Obviously it would be a crippled version of those, as it would include only artists or albums you already have.  You'd loose the discoverability last.fm provides because last.fm shows you stuff you might not have.

3- Use the other image sources (i.e. fanart.tv and theaudodb.com) to download artist and album images.  This would require a substantive rewrite of AS to support artist thumbnails and album covers, and I really don't like the idea of putting more of a burden on these other services just because the folks at last.fm are hostile to the developer community.  It's basically shifting the costs from last.fm to the other services.

I'll add this to the list for the next major version (3.x) and see what I can do.  I suspect I'll ponder them in the order I listed, but I almost certainly won't do #3.