[tacky147]

Hey guys,

First of all, I love Kodi and have been using it for quite a while.  As many of you (probably) I keep my media library pretty organized.  I'm currently using Kodi 17.6 for Windows, and here's some background on my setup.  I have (had) hi-res images of all of my albums embedded in the files as well as in each of the album folders titled "folder.jpg". 

The folder structure is: Music/FLAC/Artist/Album/song.flac 

I have my library scraper set up as "local information only" because all of my music files are meticulously tagged so I don't need Kodi to go out and get more information for me.  However, today when I opened up Kodi, my library updated automatically and (contrary to my desire) started overwriting all of my album artwork with "Album Art_{insert long alphanumeric code here}_Large.jpg" along with similar "Album Art_{}_Small.jpg", "AlbumArtSmall.jpg" and "folder.jpg" (hence why my artwork got overwritten). 

Before I go back and re-download all of my album art and get everything back in order, is there any setting I can change to make sure this doesn't happen again?  I can't seem to find any setting where I allowed Kodi to overwrite any files or had any scrapers selected to download album artwork.  Is there some buried setting that I'm missing?  Thanks guys!

[Karellen]

Strange one. Not heard of that happening before. First lets start off with a bit of background info...

Which skin are you using...
Which add-ons do you have installed... maybe cdArt?
Can you provide the Debug Log of that occurrence? If you have not shutdown yet, it will be kodi.log. If you shutdown once and restarted, it will be kodi.old.log.

No, there is no setting. If you had Local Information set, then nothing should have happened online.

started overwriting all of my album artwork with "Album Art_{insert long alphanumeric code here}_Large.jpg"

Which artwork did it start overwriting- your local files or in the cache or elsewhere? Where are you seeing these weird filenames?

Though I have seen that format filename before, but this very minute I cannot remember from where.

[tacky147]

Here goes:

Skin: Arctic Zephyr
Add-Ons: The only ones I can think might affect it would be the Universal Album Scraper and Universal Artist Scraper, but they're only installed because I can't figure out how to uninstall them.
Debug Log link: https://paste.kodi.tv/sebuwoyuka

Kodi randomly started writing all of the following files for every album in my library and put them in the local album folder (not in the cache):
Album Art_{insert long alphanumeric code here}_Large.jpg
Album Art_{}_Small.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
folder.jpg

All of the files that it's inserting are extremely low quality, so I assume it's intending it to be some sort of cache.  Is there maybe something I can modify in advancedsettings.xml that might change the cache location to some other file?  Also, I would prefer if kodi just used my original files or perhaps cached those files at their original quality in a common location.  Is that possible?

Thanks for the help man!

[Karellen]

Kodi randomly started writing all of the following files for every album in my library and put them in the local album folder (not in the cache):

Still not clear if you have local artwork. If you do, then it is named like folder.jpg, fanart.jpg, banner.jpg etc. So none of your original artwork was overwritten.

The Kodi export won't export using those filenames. It uses the standard naming conventions.

Is there maybe something I can modify in advancedsettings.xml that might change the cache location to some other file? 

The cache is a folder containing versions of the original artwork. It is not a single file. Changing its location won't achieve anything. Kodi still requires a cache to operate, regardless of where it is located.

Read about cache here... https://kodi.wiki/view/Artwork#Managing_Artwork Also take note of the limitations in v17.6, and the Note for v18.

Hopefully someone else can identify where the artwork is coming from from those filenames. I still can't recall where I have seen them, but I am pretty sure it is something through Windows.

Your log does not show anything.

[DaveBlake]

Kodi randomly started writing all of the following files for every album in my library and put them in the local album folder (not in the cache):
Album Art_{insert long alphanumeric code here}_Large.jpg
Album Art_{}_Small.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
folder.jpg

There is nothing withi Kodi that can create "Album Art..." files, and while export can create folder.jpg it has to be run manually. The Universal scrapers also do not create local image files, however it is possible that some other art addon has done this.

The log shows screensaver Kaster, Artist Slideshow and Skin Helper Service running (or failing) but I do not know that any of these would overwrite your art. Perhaps someone else can recognise the file naming?

It is very odd and not an issue I have heard of before. I know that telling you what isn't doing it does not make it stop, but it at least rules out some things.

[tacky147]

Thanks for the response guys.  

Karellen, to clarify I do have local album artwork stored in each of the album folders in my library.  The filename for each of these is "folder.jpg".  Since whichever program or add-on created a new "folder.jpg", it overwrote my original artwork.

Thanks for the data on the cache!  That's helpful and it'll be nice to see the higher res photos work on v18.

DaveBlake, with previous versions of my library I have used the manual album art export option creates those files.  Even if you couldn't nail down the source I appreciate the elimination of a couple of items.  

I'll update if I'm able to find something that fixes it.  Thanks!

[DaveBlake]

Ha! I think I have found the cause of the file overwrite, and it is nothing to do with Kodi or any of its addons.

See https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,67704.0.html

Windows or Windows Media Player 11 keep creating Folder.jpg and multiple AlbumArtSmall.jpg's in my music folders.  (I haven't opened WMP in 2 years and all downloading information options are set to off).  It may happen just from visiting the folder, or maybe clicking on the mp3's, I have no idea.

It was probably  Windows Media Player

[jjd-uk]

Those WMP issues all seem to be rather old, however I would still suspect one of the Windows media features, perhaps one of the Windows UPnP media sharing features.

[scott967]

I've had WMP write those crap files on occasion, but never overwriting my folder.jpg.

scott s.
.

[PhilYHC]

you could try this, which i have posted elsewhere:

i removed all my music from the WMP library, and removed my album folder also.
i then deleted all the annoying hidden artwork files "AlbumArt" "Folder" and "AlbumArtxxxxxx"
i then told my software (MediaMonkey) to save all covers as cover.jpg and then i added this to advancedsetings:

<musicthumbs>
<remove>folder.jpg|Folder.jpg</remove>
<add>cover.jpg|artist.jpg</add>
</musicthumbs>

[gibxxi]

If you have any of Windows (7/8/10) "Media Features" installed (Add/Remove Programs -> Windows Features) the uPnP Media Server will be installed and enabled by default. You can remove all the Media Features items from Windows to stop this from happening, but in my experience this causes knock-on effects with regards the way Windows works (as a whole) that may be undesirable. My solution, as there's absolutely no way to Stop Media Player / WMP uPnP Server from bastardizing your music collection - EVEN if that content isn't in the WMP library, is to simply avoid using WMP, and avoid storing *any* music in the default Windows Music folder for your login profile.

I have a separate drive, which is a backup of the music collection I store on my NAS, and use that for local access with Winamp, MediaMonkey, etc.

I once read a blog post by a guy who went through all manner of hacks and tweaks in order to stop WMP "processing" his art tags. He was unsuccessful, which lead me to the belief that my solution, was the only (viable) alternative.

[gibxxi]

Oh, one other thing, Windows is a case-sensitive OS, and it also classes "Folder.jpg" files as system files (i.e: as part of a WMP library) and will hide these files if named as such. But bizarrely enough, if the files are named with a lower case "f", e.g: "folder.jpg" Windows will completely ignore them. Neither will it process them (adding the album art & album art small files) nor will it hide them. Bit tricky to "update" one to the other, since Windows will continue to "display" the renamed file as "Folder.jpg" even though it's been renamed to "folder.jpg". One (tedious) trick is to simply remove the "F", save, rinse and repeat with the lower-case rename, and Windows will correctly show the "renamed" version.

I have spent more hours battling this very issue than I care to mention.

[tkgafs]

I have a perl script which will do this for you if anybody needs it