Displaying pictures of artists?

[simoncn]

(27-03-2015 14:37)audio_elf Wrote:  Simon, are you suggesting this isn't possible with a UPnP server generally, or just saying it's not possible in MinimServer? I've just noticed that the Plex server provides artist thumbnails while browsing and actually liked the appearance.

Is there no possibility of providing a thumbnail / images facility - perhaps having a "images" folder; then a "Artists" sub folder and match a .jpg / .png to the artists name. With the same working for Composers and Conductors, etc? Could also then add an image for "Artists" browse tree so that all the icons aren't identical.

It would obviously be up to the user to manually add the images.

I meant that it isn't possible with MinimServer.

MinimServer provides special treament for album art images but it doesn't provide special treatment for any other types of images (artists, composers, conductors, orchestras, soloists, instruments, etc.)

Previous requests for this capability have been for the specific case of artist images. I don't feel comfortable with making some special provision for artist images without also enabling this for other types of images.

It's reasonably straightforward to locate album art images because these are either embedded in the album's track file or located in the same folder as the album's tracks. For other images, this is much more difficult because they would need to be separate files that might be located anywhere in the user's library.

Requiring these images to be located in an "images" folder (presumably directly underneath the content directory) would make it easier to implement this feature. As the user can specify up to 8 content directories, this would require searching up to 8 different locations but this would be more manageable than searching the entire library.

A slight difficulty with this approach is that some artist (etc.) names might not be valid filenames, so some kind of aliasing scheme would need to be devised.

These images would be shown in the MinimServer index when making selections such as Artist > The Beatles or Composer > Beethoven. They would not be visible anywhere else.

I would be interested to hear the views of other users about whether they would find such a scheme useful.