[Milhouse]

as if u remember from the ember thread I had shared my thumbnails folder on the NAS for all clients which I have undone as per the standard and your advice. so essentially I have no thumbnails for any client now.

If you're bandwidth limited, what you should be using is local artwork - download once, cache many times. You can achieve this through media management tools, or by exporting your library once you've cached the first client.

Or you can use the mklocal.py script (same github as texturecache.py) to download remote artwork in original quality (and not the lower quality exported from the texture cache) for movies, tvshows and movie sets and then update the media library to use the new local artwork - it's a little complicated to use, you'll need to scan back though the thread for details on usage. mklocal.py can also be used to load non-standard local artwork (ie. discart, logo, clearart etc.)

would it help any if I copied the thumbnail folder from the master instance of kodi to the clients just once after this utility completes?? or is that not recommended either??

You can do that (make sure you copy both Textures13.db and the Thumbnails folder) as long as the master/client hardware and configuration are identical (ie. both x86 with the same imageres/fanartres settings). I wouldn't recommend this approach if your master is x86 and your client is a Raspberry Pi, for instance.