Actor / Actress Image Artwork

[jbinkley60]

With Mezzmo v6.0.6.0 a new feature called UserPoster was added where you can place actor / actress images to override what is scraped by Mezzmo or to add your own images for those which may be missing from the movie and TV database sites. This feature also provides the ability to share images between users. I've manually created just over 1,000 images that mostly aren't in the movie and TV database sites. A few others are ones where I didn't like the default scraped images. If there is interest I can post a zip file with them on the Mezzmo Kodi addon GitHub repioitory for folks to download. Any Mezzmo client which displays the actor / actress images, including the Mezzmo Android app, will be able to leverage this. All you would need to do is download the zip file and unzip it into the UserPoster folder.

Let me know if there is interest. I'd also be willing to post periodic updates, since I continually find missing images.


Thanks,


Jeff

[martyd]

Jeff, it sounds like a great idea and would be much appreciated by many (including me). As if you're not busy enough!

[hsbrown2]

I'd be interested in this, as well as pointers to info on how to use the UserPoster feature.

Thanks!

[jbinkley60]

I'd be interested in this, as well as pointers to info on how to use the UserPoster feature.

Thanks!

The UserPoster feature is simple to utilize. With version 6.0.6.0 and higher there is now a folder called: \UserPoster which is a folder in the Mezzmo\Artwork folder. When Mezzmo looks for actor / Actress artwork it looks there first for images before looking in the normal \Artwork folder. Thus anything in that folder overrides what Mezzmo may have scraped from the Internet database sites. I use this for actors / actresses where Mezzmo found no images or the ones it found I had images I preferred more. The only requirement to use UserPoster, other than Mezzmo 6.0.6 and higher, is to use the proper image file naming convention.

For the UserPoster folder it is simply:

ben-browder.jpg (first name and last name separated by a hyphen instead of a space)
Brandon-J--Shaw.jpg (Note periods are denoted as a hyphen i.e. Brandon K. Shaw)

** Note that the names are not case sensitive.

The UserPoster feature gives you more control of what is displayed. I'll message you off-line about the images.


Jeff

[hsbrown2]

Thanks very much! I've been doing some experimentation with this new feature, but I'm not having a great deal of luck. From what I've been able to glean from the threads in the forum, the folder is located at <systemdrive>:\Users\<mezzmouser>\AppData\Local\Co nceiva\Mezzmo\Artwork\UserPoster. At least that is the location where I located this folder.

Placing all the images I have in that folder and then indexing (Maintain Library) the Actors playlist seems to produce sporadic results. Enabling web scraping produces a few results, but not very many. Browsing the tables in mezzmo.db I don't see anything jumping out at me with regard to the relationship between actors and images.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Worth making a note of is that all my videos are locked (all my content is locked immediately once the metadata is indexed and validated).

[jbinkley60]

Thanks very much! I've been doing some experimentation with this new feature, but I'm not having a great deal of luck. From what I've been able to glean from the threads in the forum, the folder is located at <systemdrive>:\Users\<mezzmouser>\AppData\Local\Co nceiva\Mezzmo\Artwork\UserPoster. At least that is the location where I located this folder.

Placing all the images I have in that folder and then indexing (Maintain Library) the Actors playlist seems to produce sporadic results. Enabling web scraping produces a few results, but not very many. Browsing the tables in mezzmo.db I don't see anything jumping out at me with regard to the relationship between actors and images.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Worth making a note of is that all my videos are locked (all my content is locked immediately once the metadata is indexed and validated).

You don't need to do anything other than place the images in the UserPoster folder. What happens is that Mezzmo will look for the actor image file there first before looking in the normal poster folder at:
<systemdrive>:\Users\<mezzmouser>\AppData\Local\Co nceiva\Mezzmo\Artwork\Poster. No maintenance, enabling web scraping or anything else should needed since Mezzmo searches by the actor file name and will find either in UserPoster or poster. If it finds it in both then it will prefer the image in UserPoster. The only difference is the file naming.

In poster it will be: cva_srch-first-last
In UserPoster it will be just: first-last

The best way to test it is to find an actor in UserPoster where you have the same actor file already in the poster folder. Then delete it / rename it in the poster folder and Mezzmo will still serve it out of user poster. The testing part of this can be a little tricky, depending upon your client and client caching. If you are using the Mezzmo Kodi addon a quick way to test, since you have an SQL table viewer is to find the an actor in the actor table and find the art_urls value. Typically they are something like:

"http://192.168.0.34:53168/content/image?imagesearch=Tom+Selleck"

This happens to be one of my Mezzmo servers. You can replace the IP address and the actor name with whatever you want and an actor in the UserPoster table, in this case Tom Selleck for me. If I put this URL in my browser Mezzmo will serve up the image. This will prove UserPoster is working. If you are using the Mezzmo Kodi addon the default cache timer is 30 minutes to clear the image cache. You can either wait up to 30 minutes, look for a message in the log "2022-03-05 13:48:37.056 T:64204 NOTICE: Mezzmo textures cache timers 0 rows updated." or change the "Cache Mezzmo Images" setting to disable which will force the addon to download the images every time. If you do change the setting I wouldn't leave it that way long term to reduce the load on the server and improve the addon performance.


Jeff

[hsbrown2]

So in my case, I'm just trying to populate the actor artwork for the first time - that is to say, no artists images exist (although there might be a few from my experiments). I don't scrape using Mezzmo, I use Tiny Media Manager to scrape.

I've placed some files in UserPoster for actors that exist, as well as a dump from the zip file. Although a very few, like maybe 10, seem to possibly have worked, the vast majority of them do not show art. Looking at the Actors playlist, most of them (looking in the Mezzmo GUI) show a cover of a random movie in the group of movies associated with the actor.

I'm also not finding an obvious Actor table - the closest I am finding is MGOFileArtist, which just has a list of actors in it, and no URL. I haven't messed with any of the out-of-the-box playlists, so this is the Mezzmo original.

[jbinkley60]

So in my case, I'm just trying to populate the actor artwork for the first time - that is to say, no artists images exist (although there might be a few from my experiments). I don't scrape using Mezzmo, I use Tiny Media Manager to scrape.

I've placed some files in UserPoster for actors that exist, as well as a dump from the zip file. Although a very few, like maybe 10, seem to possibly have worked, the vast majority of them do not show art. Looking at the Actors playlist, most of them (looking in the Mezzmo GUI) show a cover of a random movie in the group of movies associated with the actor.

I'm also not finding an obvious Actor table - the closest I am finding is MGOFileArtist, which just has a list of actors in it, and no URL. I haven't messed with any of the out-of-the-box playlists, so this is the Mezzmo original.

Peter will need to weigh in here on the tie in between the actor playlist and UserPoster internal to Mezzmo and whether you will see UserPoster images reflected in the actor active playlist in the Mezmo GUI. I don't run the actor active playlist myself. With 60,000+ actors it got unwieldy and having the actor info already in the client or available via a client search, more than meets my needs. I deleted the actor active playlist and Peter did some decoupling between that playlist and what the clients see with poster / UserPoster.

I am focusing on what the clients see, which display the actor images when playing movies. UserPoster works fine on all of my clients including Mezzmo and Kodi. What I would suggest is trying the URL like I mentioned and see if your browser is seeing the right actor artwork and then checking your clients (not sure what they are):

"http://192.168.0.34:53168/content/image?imagesearch=Tom+Selleck"


Jeff

[hsbrown2]

OK, that works, but it's really difficult to validate, and verify that I have all the actors' images. Do you have a SQL query that will help? I'm OK with that. Even just pointers to the tables I should look at and relationships would be a big help.

[jbinkley60]

OK, that works, but it's really difficult to validate, and verify that I have all the actors' images. Do you have a SQL query that will help? I'm OK with that. Even just pointers to the tables I should look at and relationships would be a big help.

You bring up a good point, if the goal is to identify missing actor images. I'll give it some thought on how it might be able to be accomplished. I don't think a simple SQL query will work for UserPoster. It might work for the poster folder since I believe the Mezzmo DB maintains a direct pointer to the poster folder for each actor but I know it doesn't for UserPoster. Peter will need to comment here.

One thought might be something which can query the list of actors out of the Mezzmo database into a new SQL database and then import directory listings of poster and UserPoster into the same database. Then SQL join queries could be run to do a quick comparison and identify missing images or current images and which folder they reside

If you have or are willing to load Python on a PC and are interested in this approach I can probably write this fairly quickly.


Jeff