Share thumbnails from smb share

There is an addon (in beta) that aims to sync addons, thumbnails, fanart, etc between your xbmc installs. This way everything is local but you can still keep stuff in sync. May be worth checking out.

https://github.com/declankenny/XBMC_datasync

Yeah, that looks like what I was looking for. Good work. I'll keep an eye on it now, to see how it progresses.

(2012-05-08 04:44)Mordred Wrote:  HOWEVER, what it won't do is sync your library's thumbnails. They aren't stored in database at all and are locally cached. You can store your thumbnail folder on a networked server, but unfortunately this is slow as hell for machines that aren't local to the thumbnail folder. That's why we're discussing methods for syncing the folder locally between machines. Fanart is the biggest culprit because it can take a full second (or more) to transfer a 1-2MB file between the networked location and your remote PC. The problem is there's no good built-in way to do this in XBMC currently. The recommended "solution" is to manually sync your Thumbnail folder between machines every so often so that you can still store it locally.

thanks for clearing that up

seems to me (without looking at how this new addon works) that we need simply for xbmc to allow for local caching of thumbnails (or ANYTHING with images such as music cover art) this combined with a 'lookup' to the server for any changes so only new content or modified content gets pulled on each boot, cant see it being too hard its basically an adaptation of rsync or something simular.

Of course as mentioned earlier and others mentioned you can already do this quite easy and perhaps its just a case of setting up a scheduled XBMC node update for your clients folders at the early hours then shutdown using WOL? just point the thumbnail folder local and have data pushed to each local folder from the server, but have the films on the nas.

not a very user friendly option though ^

I recently set up a new low end XBMC box just to play music on my living room audio. (headless, I just play from the web interface). I have 400+ albums in my existing directory, and hated the thought of re-caching all those thumbnails. So I copied the music thumbnails folder to the new box, but it did not tie them to each album. So then I copied the music database , which I hesitated because I was going from a Dharma to and Eden, but it worked and saved me mucho effort. So my point is that these syncing solutions should work just fine, at least for music. Or you could occasionally manually update one of the systems.

Since this experience, I have begun putting cover art in each album folder when I add new music, I wish I'd done that all along.

Hi Lads,

Just a quick question from a newbie.

I was trying to share the thumbails over SMB but didn't manage to get it working either way and from what I'm reading here I'm probably just going to do local copies.

Soooo if I just remove the thumbail path substitution and "update" my library it will download the thumbnails and images to their correct folder? Or do I have to clear the library for it to download the thumbnails again?

Thanks
Gary