People images organization

[dimitrik 14]

I am trrying to find some documentation on how the people images should be organized so I can set my fetcher (metabrowser) to point to the right folder.

 

I had a folder called \\Mediabrowser\ImagesByName\ created for this pourpose

 

Inside it there were tens of thousands of folders named after actors etc, and a series of folders for each letter of the alphabet, also populated with thousands of sub-folders for actors.

 

I read in another thread a post by EBR that suggested the right structure is:

 

\ImagesByName\People\{initial letter}\{Actor Name}

 

I copied all the existing folders into this structure (which by the way took ages) and now I found that Mediabrowser created another few thousand folders under \People\ (not under the initial letter folders). These folders are actually all empty.

 

I have no clue why it would do that since I've disabled the "Refresh People" Task. As far as I can tell, it did it when doing a standard library scan (which by the way, makes no sense whatsoever, especially since I've also disabled "download metadata" under library settings).

 

Can someone please explain what the correct structure is for the people folder?

 

And can we please have, in a future update, some more consistent behaviour? If you disable the "download metadata" settings, the server shouldn't be creating thousands of empty people folders.

 

It would perhaps be better if MBS had a "read only" mode where it just depends on existing metadata and writes nothing to the disk, for people like me who use more advanced metadata fetchers.

Edited November 30, 2014 by dimitrik

[Luke 42079]

the default is to use the letter subfolders. the only way you'd get actors directly under people is by changing a hidden xml to make it behave like the old days. There is nothing in MBS that changes that setting. Maybe metabrowser changes it so that it can populate it. I don't know. But changing that setting is the only way that situation could happen.

[dimitrik 14]

I have two mediabroswer servers running on my LAN (both pointing to the same NAS) and metabrowser is only running on my desktop. Therefore I'd be pretty surprised if it had changed this setting, not to mention that fatal (the metabroswer dev) probably wouldn't do anything excessive like that. I also havben't messed with the xml files since the old MB2 days and certainly never with this setting.

 

So I can assure you that not onlyu does MBS do this, but it just did it again in the last 10 minutes as part of a library scan. I just go another 500 folders in the people folder. I also checked the metadata editor on the webclient adn for every actor, the path does NOT incluide the letter subfolders.

 

Therefore can you please tell me how to fix this?

[Luke 42079]

And I can promise you that MBS does not do that by default unless you or some other process has changed the xml setting.

 

So, one of us is wrong.

 

In any case, you can find system.xml and set EnablePeoplePrefixSubFolders to true

[dimitrik 14]

And I can promise you that MBS does not do that by default unless you or some other process has changed the xml setting.

 

So, one of us is wrong.

 

And I can admit when that's me;-)

 

I found system.xml and it was set to false. Thanks Luke!

 

I honestly have no idea how it happened. I never ran metabrowser on the HTPC whose server was creating the folders.

Maybe the problem happened due to gradual migrations from MB2?

 

Anyway now I have another problem with people images - the servers are pointing in the right folder but the clients (e.g. MBC, web client etc) still don't show the pictures. Is there anything I can do to force a refresh?

[dimitrik 14]

OK, I figured it out - I ran the "update people" task and it refreshed the images.

 

Thanks again for your help Luke!