[Milhouse]

By the way, can i ask a very basic stupid question, whats the point of cleaning your thumbnails? what thumbnails? why use this utility, how does it benifit

Kodi caches artwork - both local (LAN) and remote (http) artwork - in the "texture cache" which consists of a local database (Textures13.db) and the Thumbnails folder. It does this for a few reasons, though mainly to improve performance when displaying artwork as Kodi doesn't have to keep downloading it from the web or local LAN each time, also so Kodi can optimise the format and size of the cached artwork suitable for the display device (low powered devices might use smaller, lower quality artwork than a "big" i7 system, or might be able to hardware decode some jpg formats but not others - the cached artwork will always be hardware decodable).

Unfortunately Kodi isn't very good at removing old items from the texture cache - each time you browse through the available videos in the YouTube add-on, those thumbnails of YouTube videos are being added to your cached, and are never removed. Movies or TV Shows and episodes that are removed from the library never have their thumbnails removed from the cache. This can lead to the cache "bloating" with hundreds, possibly thousands, of thumbnails you'll never display again.

This "bloat" can result in the cache increasing in size to many GBs, and some systems, eg. Apple TV, Android etc., have only limited space available for the texture cache, so "cleaning" the cache every now and again is a means to reclaim the available space by deleting the thumbnails you no longer need, while still keeping the thumbnails you do use.

It's probably worth cleaning the cache once a month. You can schedule this script to run using cron (or whatever the Windows equivalent is), either on the Kodi client itself or from a central system. The command to clean the texture cache is "texturecache.py P" (P for prune, as that's what it does... selectively getting rid of the useless stuff). It's not a quick process, as it has to do a lot of work and can take a few minutes, so running it overnight when you're not using the systems would be advised - you certainly don't want to run it at startup.

Once you've started to schedule one maintenance job, scheduling others becomes a piece of cake... pre-loading the cache with all artwork ("texturecache c"), updating imdb ratings and votes for movies and tvshows, eliminating artwork from the cache that Kodi has forgotten about ("texturecache.py R") or that Kodi thinks is in the cache when it's not ("texturecache.py Xd" - although this last one is best run on the client itself), etc. etc.