Option to use manual image population

[EZEd 53]

Request to the devs to regress a little, go back and provide a more manual image population capabilty similar to how Emby once possessed back in the Emby Classic/WMC days.  The automation provided by the various image and metadata scrapers is great and all but when they don't work they really can screw up a library presentation. For commercial video the scrapers are great but they really are making a mess of my music library.  When I turn the scrapers on they always create duplicate artist entries and/or strange non-existent/sensicle artist entries of various artist from varying albums.

 

To get around this I have rebuilt my music library several times (after getting a very organized mp3tag metadata normalization) and turned off the music scrapers.  The library organization is now (mostly) like it needs to be but of course sense no scrapers image population is lacking.

 

The folder view is fine because Emby uses the folder.jpg image in the folder to populate the artist image.  But when you try to view music by artist view or artist album view you get no images because the system doesn't use folder.jpg files to populate the views.  Also, back in the Classic days I had added a lot of backdrop images to the top level artist folders so that during music playback I would have a backdrop slideshow of the artist playing.  Emby no longer respects these files and I have to manually add them to the imagery for them to function.

 

The request is to provide a manual mode for Emby to fall back on when scrapers are turned off that uses folder.jpg and backdrop.jpg image files to automatically fill in imagery for music artist and backdrop slideshows.

 

This the view of my Music library when viewing by folders with scrapers turned off...

 

This is the view of my Music library when viewing artist view with scrapers turned off

 

Similarly for artist album view

 

I can add images manually for all artist and backdrops but that would need to be each individual image both folder and backdrop for over 1000 artist.  Not very efficient and very tedious.  Either provide a way to apply multiple images easily through direct drag and drop or just use the folder.jpg and backdrop.jpg images that are already loaded to the folders where the music files are like the old system did or any other method that would auto populate what is already there.

 

Please consider this request.  I'm sure some users that don't even know that they need this would appreciate an option if it was provided.

 

Thx

Ed

[Luke 37062]

Hi, all you need to do is turn off the internet metadata fetchers, no?

[Happy2Play 8281]

Hi, all you need to do is turn off the internet metadata fetchers, no?

 

Since Emby no longer uses folder based Artists, Emby must be able to pull from the internet via a artist source. 

 

So that is totally normal for the Artists and Album Artists as folder based images are not used

[ebr 14912]

So this is really specific to Artist images, correct?

[EZEd 53]

@@ebr, specific in my case yes because it is the music fetchers that I have turned off.  They consistently break my music library so I can't use them.  Movies and TV Shows aren't as bad for me because I have much less content of that type.  Photos and Family video isn't bad because it is all manual anyway.  I've done all that I can do in pre-configuring mp3 tag information using metadata tools like MP3Tag and others.  Also have implemented the best folder structure I can to house the files and album folders. But each time I try and rebuild the music library with fetchers turned on it takes too many liberties with interpreting the artist folder structure and either creates duplicate entries that I can't merge or purge and get rid of; or in at least a few cases it creates its own artist identities out of several different artists and places their albums in something like a compendium or compilation record (maybe based on Genre? - I can't tell what the logic of organization is).  In any case the result is roughly about 8 or 10 artist records called "LBU", "LBUM", "LBUM A" ... through roughly "LBUM ARTIS". 

 

I can see what it is doing... truncating the words ALBUM and ALBUM ARTIST but why would it do that to create album artist or artist records of its own volition and there aren't any folders in my library called "ALBUM" or "ALBUM ARTIST"?  I do have one folder called "Various Artist" that does have compilation type/style albums in it.  But all of the song files in all of those albums are in separate folders and each of the files begins with the term Various Artist.  So a typical song file in one of those folders would be named <Various Artist - song name title - artist name.ext>.  The folder structure is <Music>\<Various Artist>\<Album Title>\<Song File Name>.  There is no reason for Emby to create a new/separate artist entry for further down in the library it does correctly handle the Artist called "Various Artist" and all of the contents for that artist is correct.  It correctly applies all of the album folder names that are listed inside of it and all of the song file names are correctly nested accordingly.  In any case once these records are created, I can't purge them, so all that I can do is rename them and have them sort in some meaningful way as to give the appearance that they were intentional.  I am currently calling them Auto Group Set # (1 to N).  I can provide images of those if you'd like to see them and what they are doing.  But a simple record merge and/or purge tool would do just as well to get rid of them.

 

I suppose that would be the best way to handle all of this and actually is another request; that if we could be provided some type of database record cleanup tool that could manually merge and purge bogus records would do just as well, but in any case I still feel we need a way to manually manipulate our libraries over and above what fetchers can and will do.

 

And eventhough this request is specific to my case about music organization, I'm sure there are some others out there that may be having issues with their video organization as well.  So manual manipulation would be of benefit to them too.

 

@@Happy2Play, that precisely is my point, relying too heavily on third party automation can wreak havoc.  So an option to regress and go back to the old folder structure and manual intervention based organization would be helpful in a lot of cases.  In my particular case, a great deal of work could be done simply by applying what is already there.  Since as my image #1 indicates that the folder structure is already using the folder.jpg image to populate the artist image, why not have it simply transfer that same information to the image views for artist and album artists in images #2 & #3?  At that point all that I would have to do is clean up the duplicates and bogus entries with some type of merge/purge tool and apply all of my backdrops.

 

In the interest of making this last part easier (adding multiple backdrops), would it be possible to use either drag and drop or at minimum multiple select to add several images at once?  Currently adding any images has to be done individually one at a time through either browse or drag and drop.  Selecting multiples at once would be highly beneficial and appreciated.

 

Just more suggestions for a rainy day.

 

Post Edit:  separate issue, I just noticed it is doing something screwy with my music playlist files as well.  It is showing a few individual songs as their own playlists.  These seem to be the last 15 or so songs that I used in my latest compiled music playlist.  The playlist that compiled is there in tact but in addition the system has taken the liberty of creating its own playlist of one song each duration with each one of these individual songs.  That for sure I didn't ask for.  The original playlist was created using multiple select in one album and then adding multiple tracks from 2 other albums to the original.  As indicated the original intended playlist is created, correct and functioning correctly.  Its just that I got a little more than asked for.  When I go to delete/remove the bogus single song playlists I get the warning that the song files will be deleted and removed from the library as well, which is something that I do not want.  So here again is a place where a records clean up tool would be helpful.  I know it's unrelated to the original issue but it does bring the discussion and idea of better manual records management up a little closer to necessity.

 

Thx again

EZEd

[EZEd 53]

Oops...didn't answer @@Luke's question.  In most cases it gets rid of a number of the duplicates (not all but most) but it also creates some bogus unintended artist entries on its own that I can't figure out the logic to.  It also results in the artist views as indicated in images #2 & 3 above.  This latter part is what I am addressing with Happy2Play above.  If the same image info from image #1 could be automatically passed to images #2 & 3 a great deal of presentation work would be automatically compensated in a case where someone like me is having to turn off metadata fetchers.

 

Thx

Ed

[Luke 37062]

@@EZEd have you tried using the web interface to customize artist images?

[EZEd 53]

@@EZEd have you tried using the web interface to customize artist images?

 

Hello Luke, yes that is what I use. It's just a time consuming and tedious thing to do if one is not using scapers/fetchers to populate imagery.  In my case I have to load both a primary and backdrop image for each artist (roughly 950 of them) using the "edit image" option.  Back in the old media browser days of WMC all we had to do was load images to the artist top level folder and name them  something like Folder.jpg and/or Backdrop.jpg and they would auto-populate. This still works for Folder view but not for Artist and Album Artist views is all.  Its fine that it doesn't work that way anymore its just that it would be nice to have a manual method of speeding up this process or making it more batch like for those of us not using the auto-scrapers.

 

Thanks for your concern and consideration.

 

Ed

 

Edit: Unless I misunderstand what you are trying to suggest

Edited May 26, 2020 by EZEd

[Luke 37062]

Detecting artist folders is much more difficult than it sounds, but yes we do plan to try and bring that back in future updates. thanks for the feedback.

[ginjaninja 533]

@@EZEd, i could write a script to import images from disk if you are interested, as i am teaching myself scripting. let me know.

 

There would have to be some rules to find the path to image for each artist.

MusicAlbums have a path in database but Artists do not in the strictest sense, so it would have to inferred, perhaps from the [album?]artist's Music Albums.

 

1. an agreed set of possible artist image filenames/extensions

 

2. To find the artist image path on disk

the 1st [filesystem] folder name to match the artist name in a music library held the artist image (ie not multiple folders named solely 'ABBA') - problematic for special characters in artist names.

or

the first matching artist image name/ext in the common parent or grandparent of path of all albums with artist as album artist ....is the artist image.*

ie look 1 maybe 2 folders above the Music albums to cater for \...\Abba\[some optional folder]\Album\tracks.mp3 and \...\abba\artistimage.jpg

if you are already conformed to the simpler \...\AlbumArtist\Album\tracks.mp3 then it would be easier.

 

*if a solution for non album artists is required then another check would be required with other constraints.

 

and then some more simpler rules around whether existing images can be overwritten and whether other matching  image types beyond primary are imported from the same path eg backdrops - clearing existing**.

[**images outside the cache have no path in the database so its not possible to match images in libraries with images already in database)

 

if you are interested say if  you have a better idea on how the image path can be obtained, it wouldnt take too long to write an offline tool and would be a fun learning experience for me.

[EZEd 53]

@@EZEd, i could write a script to import images from disk if you are interested, as i am teaching myself scripting. let me know.

 

There would have to be some rules to find the path to image for each artist.

MusicAlbums have a path in database but Artists do not in the strictest sense, so it would have to inferred, perhaps from the [album?]artist's Music Albums.

 

1. an agreed set of possible artist image filenames/extensions

 

2. To find the artist image path on disk

the 1st [filesystem] folder name to match the artist name in a music library held the artist image (ie not multiple folders named solely 'ABBA') - problematic for special characters in artist names.

or

the first matching artist image name/ext in the common parent or grandparent of path of all albums with artist as album artist ....is the artist image.*

ie look 1 maybe 2 folders above the Music albums to cater for \...\Abba\[some optional folder]\Album\tracks.mp3 and \...\abba\artistimage.jpg

if you are already conformed to the simpler \...\AlbumArtist\Album\tracks.mp3 then it would be easier.

 

*if a solution for non album artists is required then another check would be required with other constraints.

 

and then some more simpler rules around whether existing images can be overwritten and whether other matching  image types beyond primary are imported from the same path eg backdrops - clearing existing**.

[**images outside the cache have no path in the database so its not possible to match images in libraries with images already in database)

 

if you are interested say if  you have a better idea on how the image path can be obtained, it wouldnt take too long to write an offline tool and would be a fun learning experience for me.

 

@@ginjaninja thanks for the offer. I am proceeding to add imagery manually it just takes a while. I likely should try scripting it myself but I figure it would take roughly the same amount of time to figure out the script as it currently does for me to manually add the images. I was just trying to make a point to the devs that there is still utility in having a file based auto-function in addition to the software based/web function of scraper plugins to gather data and imagery of this type because not everyone is able or agreeable to using the scraper plugins all of the time as their sole ancillary information source.  I know that Luke said in the future the database will be totally ID3 tag based and that may help with interface to the web based scrapers but I still see a problem for cases where the metadata used in the MP3 tags is not as accurate as could be and it still could throw off the scrapers and end up with bad info or imagery.  My main reason for having to turn off scrapers was because of the havoc created in my library by duplicate entries and added bogus entries.  It caused me to have to totally re-vamp my file structure.  The number one thing that changed was that I had to get rid of all collaborative artist and multi-artist albums and attribute them all to only one artist. As example the pianist Bob James does a lot of collaboration with a lot of different other star artist.  So for each case where I had Bob James & "other artist name" I ended up with that many entries of Bob James as the sole and only artist. Musicbrainz and AudioDB just didn't seem to understand that logic and attributed them all to a single artist but would not put them in all one folder/artist entry.  It duplicated that for as many collaborations as there were folders.  To eliminate this problem, I had to rename all files, albums and folders that had Bob James to strictly Bob James and all of the song titles then carried the collaborating artist name as featured...(e.g. Bob James - Maputo (ft David Sanborn)).  I did this even though the album is equally attributed to both artist on the cover.  Both Musicbrainz and AudioDB said that this solely a Bob James album, which is fine, that is how I re-identified it in the folder structure but doing so caused Emby to create a second Bob James entry next to the one that was simple Bob James only albums and they could not be distinguished at the artist level view.  The only place I could go to find out the truth was the music folder view.

 

This example played out over multiple artist to the tune that whereas I really only have about 950 artist folders Emby thought I had in excess of 1600 artist or individual folders.  It just wasn't representative of my true music library.  So I turned off the scrapers and for the most part, all of that disappeared.  The issue that was left was that now I have no imagery when using the artist and album artist views.  I do have imagery when viewing both Folders view and Album views because those items are included with the folder metadata from Windows explorer where they use the folder.jpg image for each folder.

 

Really all that I was asking for was that Emby be modified such that in the case where someone has turned off scrapers that the default under artist and album artist views revert to the same view as what is seen in folder view.  Because (in my case at least) I would have at least the same view and imagery that is present in folder view as opposed to nothing at all.  I could further manually modify as required but would have a decent starting point as opposed to starting from scratch as I have had to do.

 

It seems to me that this is exactly what Emby used to do under Media Browser and WMC but I suppose with the new version of Emby Server that is no longer possible.  I'll eventually struggle along and get it all sorted manually then make a good backup of the database so that if I have to rebuild in the future I won't have to start completely over and just tweak the fringes.

 

Thanks again for offer and consideration.

 

EZEd