[mikeSiLVO]

I already toggled it off/on yesterday.

All of mine are named moviename.year.gif.  Avatar.2009.gif.  None of them are named poster.gif. 
All of my poster.jpg's are named poster.jpg though as is other artwork like clearlogo.png.

I wish .gif would be the only important part.  I did rename Avatar.2009.gif to Avatar.2009-animatedposter.gif and simply animatedposter.gif but still didn't supersede poster.jpg.  (poster.jpg was removed from the title folder but when the title got re-scraped, it added it again.

I moved it on top of instead of under all instances of "$INFO[ListItem.Art(poster)]" as your example shows.  No difference.

With or without them, no text appears although text does appear at the bottom for all other items giving a description for each setting.  I assume by "the button" you mean the Animated posters on/off setting in SilVo Extras.

Hey, thank you for trying to help me.  It's progress knowing it works for you.  There must be something on my end incompatible like perhaps my scraping automation and subsequent Artwork Dump download.  Perhaps a cache entry remaining because I'm removing a title, making some changes, and adding it back right away.  That was just for a little test. 

I'm going to leave everything and next time I add a new title, I'll put a dummy.gif in it and see what happens.  My main interest is the next time I rebuild Kodi from scratch, when all of my collection gets added, will all the .gif's supersede all the poster.jpg's and automatically be applied saving me countless hours manually applying them.  I'll be sure to add your code before I do...

Thank you for your contributions and detailed explanations.

xml:
$INFO[ListItem.Art(animatedposter)]

Requires Skin Helper Service installed and enabled. Also IIRC your preferred view is MyFlix which uses a different variable to populate its posters.

xml:


	<variable name="PosterThumbVar">

		<value condition="Container.Content(genres) + !Skin.HasSetting(coloredflags)">$INFO[ListItem.Label,special://skin/extras/moviegenres/default/,.jpg]</value>

		<value condition="Container.Content(genres) + Skin.HasSetting(coloredflags)">$INFO[ListItem.Label,special://skin/extras/moviegenres/colored/,.jpg]</value>

		<value condition="!String.IsEmpty(ListItem.Art(season.poster))">$INFO[ListItem.Art(season.poster)]</value>

		<value condition="!String.IsEmpty(Container.ListItem.Art(season.poster))">$INFO[Container.ListItem.Art(season.poster)]</value>

		<value condition="!String.IsEmpty(Container.ListItem.Art(poster))">$INFO[Container.ListItem.Art(poster)]</value>

		<value condition="!String.IsEmpty(ListItem.Art(tvshow.poster))">$INFO[ListItem.Art(tvshow.poster)]</value>

		<value condition="!String.IsEmpty(ListItem.Art(poster))">$INFO[ListItem.Art(poster)]</value>

		<value condition="!String.IsEmpty(Container.ListItem.Art(tvshow.poster))">$INFO[Container.ListItem.Art(tvshow.poster)]</value>

		<value condition="!String.IsEmpty(ListItem.Art(thumb))">$INFO[ListItem.Art(thumb)]</value>

		<value>$INFO[ListItem.Icon]</value>

	</variable>

When adding variables, whichever <value> is the first one to match the condition or lack thereof is the one that is used. So things need to go in a particular order if you want something to supersede another.

Basically the first two lines are saying if in the genres container and the skin has coloredflags setting enabled or not use this value. That is then followed by if a season poster exists use $INFO[ListItem.Art(season.poster)] etc...

I don't like adding things to the skin using scripts/addons that are not in the Kodi repo and Skin Helper Service updates are not being pushed there