Actor / Actress Image Artwork

[hsbrown2]

No worries, I do a lot of work with the Mezzmo db using PowerShell. I just assumed that the images were indexed somewhere and a relationship was created.

What I will probably do in this case is use TMM to scrape them all, then copy them off to the UserPoster folder, etc…then I’ll scan for any missing images.

[jbinkley60]

No worries, I do a lot of work with the Mezzmo db using PowerShell. I just assumed that the images were indexed somewhere and a relationship was created.

What I will probably do in this case is use TMM to scrape them all, then copy them off to the UserPoster folder, etc…then I’ll scan for any missing images.

I actually have the utility almost fully written.

Here's what it does:

• Pulls an actor listing from Mezzmo and normalizes it for comparison to poster and UserPoster
• Inserts Mezzmo actor records and normalized records into a table
• Pulls UserPoster listing and inserts file into a table
• Updates Mezzmo actor record table if there is a UserPoster file match
• Pulls Poster listing and inserts file into a table
• Updates Mezzmo actor record table if there is a Poster file match

I am finishing up the last 2 items on the list and it might be ready tomorrow for more extensive testing. It's been helpful for me already in that it has found files in UserPoster that has no corresponding actor in Mezzmo. About 30 of my 2,300+ UserPoster files were this way. Most due to special characters or typos in the UserPoster file name.

Here's a sample output of what you see in the command window:

Mezzmo actor comparison v1.0
Mezzo database file location: v:\mezzmo\Mezzmo.db
Mezzmo artwork folder: v:\mezzmo\artwork\
Mezzmo check database completed.
Getting Mezzmo database actor records.
Mezzo actor records found: 68188
Getting Mezzmo UserPoster files.
Mezzo UserPoster files found: 2222
Mezzo UserPoster files without Mezzmo actor: 0

This only takes a few seconds to run on my system.


Jeff

[jbinkley60]

I have posted the initial release of the Mezzmo Artwork Checker.

You can download it here .

This utility can help you manage your actor / actress artwork. It queries your Mezzmo database
for a listing of actors / actresses and then scans the Poster / UserPoster folders looking for
matching artwork files. The actorArtwork table will show the matches.

The utility also has a CSV export option to export the actorArtwork table.

While this utility does not write to your Mezzmo database, it is always recommended to
backup your Mezzmo.db file prior to running this utility.

Please provide feedback and let me know if you have any issues. I have found this utility to
be very helpful.


Jeff

[jbinkley60]

I've added a few tweaks Mezzmo Artwork Checker and have posted version1.0.2 .

v1.0.2

- Added an actor no match file output for CSV exports. This CSV file will contain
a listing of all actors / actresses which do not have a Poster or UserPoster
artwork file.
- Changed CSV output file names by appending the hour/minute/second that the CSV
export was done. This will allow keeping of CSV files for historical purposes
vs. overwriting them each time.

v1.0.1

- Fixed performance issue with Poster file scanning due to missing database index
- Changed poster and UserPoster scanning to look for additions during scan vs.
deleting all files and adding them during scanning
- actorArtwork dateAdded field is now the last time the record was updated or
the date/time the Mezzmo actor was added, if no updates have occurred.


If you don't want to run this against your production Mezzmo database you can stop your Mezzmo server and GUI.
Then copy the Mezzmo.db file off to another location and update the Mezzmo Artwork checker configuration file
to this backup copy. It isn't necessary but is an other option for running the checker.

With the performance enhancements in version 1.0.1 I am seeing it take less than 15 seconds to analyze 2,200+
UserPoster files, 48,000+ Poster files and 68,000+ Mezzmo records including generating the CSV files.

The actor no match CSV file is a quick way to see which actors / actresses do not have corresponding artwork.
I may investigate adding an off-line scraping capability for these actor no matches which would create
UserPoster files if it can find images. This is a potential future feature for now since there are many image
scrapers already.


Thanks,

Jeff

[jbinkley60]

I've uploaded v1.0.3 of the Mezzmo Artwork Checker. This version has a couple of
key new features including last checked and status tracking of your actor /
actress artwork. It also adds the ability to retrieve missing artwork from the IMDB
database and put them into a folder called IMDB so you can review them before
moving to the UserPoster folder.


Features:

v1.0.3

- Added last checked tracking and status to the actorArtwork table. You can now
see the last time am actor was checked and the status of the image file.
- Added IMDB actor image fetching with command line option "images". The "images"
option will attempt to fetch properly sized actor / actress images from IMDB,
will name them for the UserPoster file name format and will save them in a folder
called IMDB for review, prior to copying to the UserPoster folder. You can also
limit the number of images fetched each time in the configuration file. The
default is 30 and the maximum is 500.

*** Note the "images" feature requires a valid IMBD API Key in the configuration
file. You can get an IMDB API Key at: https://imdb-api.com/pricing
You can register for a free key which will allow up to 100 images a day. ***


I hope you like the new features and convenience of the IMDB addition. The
additional value of using IMDB is that it is complimentary to the TMDB database
that the internal Mezzmo scraper uses. Now you will have the benefits of
leveraging both databases.

Please let me know if you have any questions or find any issues.


Thanks,

Jeff

[jbinkley60]

I've uploaded v1.0.4 of the Mezzmo Artwork Checker. This version has a couple of
key new features including the ability to mark bad images and skipping images which
have already been retrieved. It also has fixes for non-ASCII characters and improved
IMDB server error checking.


Features and fixes:

v1.0.4

- Improved IMDB error checking when actor / actress does not exist / not found.
- Fixed IMDB image fetching failures with non-ASCII characters in actor names
- Added new command line option: "bad" followed by the bad actor file name to
indicate the image from IMDB is bad and to not download it again.

Example command: mezzmo_actor.py bad john-doe

This will mark john-doe as a bad image and will not attempt to download again
unless mezzmo_actor.py clean is run to clear the Mezzmo Actor database. This
feature is handy when IMDB has a bad image that you don't like for an actor.
- Added skipping IMDB image fetching for a actor / actress where a valid image
file is already on your Mezzmo server or has already been fetched from IMDB.
- Improved IMDB server error detection for server busy and invalid API key
- Fixed Poster and UserPoster image file information updating after initial
record insertion into the posterFile and userPosterFile tables.


I've done extensive testing on this release checking over 5,000+ IMDB actor /
actress entries. It is also quite fast, going through 500 checks in approximately
20 minutes. Once you've gone through your entire Mezzmo database and moved
the new images into your UserPoster folder, it will be much faster since it will mark
new images as found and will not try to retrieve them on the second pass.

I am looking at possibly adding TMDB as a second but primary image retrieval
source. This way you can check images off-line from Mezzmo using the same
source. If I am able to implement this feature, it would try TMDB first and only
try IMDB if it did not find an image on TMDB. It would mark the image as not
found if it was not in either database. You could also choose only to use IMDB
by not entering an IMDB API Key.

Please let me know if you have any questions or find any issues.


Thanks,

Jeff

[ftanner]

Might be better to write it in something other than Python as most people running Mezzmo, on Windows, don't have Python installed. Something a little more "universal" to Windows.

[jbinkley60]

Might be better to write it in something other than Python as most people running Mezzmo, on Windows, don't have Python installed. Something a little more "universal" to Windows.

I understand completely. Maybe that is a longer term option but loading Python on Windows is not a heavy lift. However, the feedback is quite fair. I am actually running and testing it on Python running on Windows.


*** Update *** As of a Windows update in 2019 you can now install Python on Windows from the Windows Store. Just type "Python" in the Windows store and it gives you and install option...


Thanks,

Jeff

[ftanner]

I understand completely. Maybe that is a longer term option but loading Python on Windows is not a heavy lift. However, the feedback is quite fair. I am actually running and testing it on Python running on Windows.


*** Update *** As of a Windows update in 2019 you can now install Python on Windows from the Windows Store. Just type "Python" in the Windows store and it gives you and install option...


Thanks,

Jeff

Installing python isn't the issue. It's the whole "needing another third party app to run". That's another app you have to maintain security updates for.

[jbinkley60]

Installing python isn't the issue. It's the whole "needing another third party app to run". That's another app you have to maintain security updates for.

Understood, especially on the security item. My day job for the past 20 years has been Cybersecurity for large multi-national corporations and general network security (including the military) for the past 40 years. The objective of the Mezzmo UserPoster functionality is to enable you to manage actor artwork outside of Mezzmo. Mezzmo scrapes images and places them into the Poster folder. UserPoster provides a way to add extra artwork and override what Mezzmo scrapes (i.e. you have a better artwork image you like vs. what Mezzmo scraped) without messing with what Mezzmo manages in the Poster folder.. UserPoster was not intended to be a part of Mezzmo, that is role of the Poster folder. I wrote the Mezzmo Artwork Checker as a way to help make the task of managing UserPoster easier with some automation and external to Mezzmo database tracking.

In the next release, I have the TMDB capability written and added with a free API Key. TMDB is what Mezzmo uses so when I post the new version you can run it and see what new artwork was added to TMDB since you added your videos or ran maintenance in Mezzmo. If you add an IMDB key it will try IMDB for any artwork it doesn't find on TMDB. It will check TMDB first. The TMDB site is blazing fast and can go through 500 queries in a couple of minutes. I am finding that TMDB has far less images than IMDB but they tend to be higher quality, which is why you see less artwork in Mezzmo but the quality is generally very good.

I'll likely post version 1.0.5 on Monday with the TMDB feature added. Peter and I are having an off-line discussion on image sizes from TMDB before I release it.


Thanks,

Jeff