[User 224999]

"Orphaned file" means you have an add-on that is stuffing the animated file into your Thumbnails folder without creating a corresponding entry (row) in Textures13.db. This is an abuse of the texture cache system. It's possible you might not even want these large animated files in your texture cache as (if you have many of them) it will lead to a lot of bloat.

For the texture cache to work optimally the add-on should also be creating the associations between the movie and the artwork (eg. poster-animated, fanart-animated as alternatives to poster and fanart).

I'd suggest contacting the author of whatever add-on is creating these gif files in your Thumbnails folder and ask them to consider a better joined-up solution.

That would be me ;-)

Animated gifs are used by some users and I offer a few tools to help them grab them.
The preference is to not store these animated gifs at all and just link to the remote location and let the Kodi texture cache do it's magic OR store them alongside with the media (by user preference) and in that case, the Kodi texture cache will also do it's magic and create a local copy of the image.

BUT... It seems that the Texture cache isn't capapable of handling the animated gifs. As soon as they're located outside a local location, the GIF is not animated anymore.
Makes sense as the texture cache creates a local cached version for the specified format which I guess is not aware of multiple frames within the image...

This is true for ALL animated gifs as far as I'm aware of, not only this specific use case with animated posters but also if you try to set a animated gif as your skin background.

I deciced to just store them locally for the time being and look at the Kodi source to find for an answer to fix the root cause.
The Thumbnails folder seemed like a safe place to them as that's used to store... cached images.

If the user cleans up the Thumbnails folder, the images will be redownloaded if needed by request.

What would be the best solution in your opinion:

1) Try the fix the root cause so the texture cache is ignored for multiframe/animated gif files.

2) Place the gifs in another local location, like temp or addon_data folder

3) ....


BTW: The artwork is actually written to the Kodidb by json API, meaning an artwork item animatedposter is added.

BTW2: The images are only downloaded if the user explicitely enabled animated artwork.