Very Nice! Thank you very much for these :)

Hi I have updated the info here to include these new versions.

This is a great little tool, especially for the music side, as most other metadata collector tools actually pull down folder and backdrops for films amd tv already.

But the music part is awesome, I had given up on the music plugin because I just didnt have the patience to pick folders and backdrops for the tonnes of music.

Out of curiousity do you think you could make this work for actors? I know some tools do pull down the actor images anyway, but it does not always get them all, and then I have to rerun it constantly.

Just curious, but again thanks for the scripts. Thumbs up

Slim: – I’m sure i could make one for actors; the only problem would be the source I suppose? Any suggestions?

Also, in response to other meta data progs pulling down the folders and backdrops, i chose to do these as the app i was using only downloaded the first backdrop without me manually having to tell it to download each one, one by one. Are there any apps that pull all of them without having to prompt? I may look into using them. :) I looked at metabrowser two but unfortunately my financial situation has changed and i cannot really justify spending money at the moment :–(

Dave2384:– The app is only designed to download an image for the artist as i couldnt seem to find a reasonable source that would work for me for the album art. I did however find an app which downloads them and even inserts the image into the mp3 files which works perfectly with my mobile. I cant honestly remember the name of the app but im sure i could find out if you wanted me to?

Hi all, i have updated my post to include a new Actor Image Downloader, check the main post for details and let me know how you get on. TV show Actor Image Downloader coming soon! :)

TV show Actor Image Downloader added! Check the main post!

I've updated the Useful Utilities and Scripts to simplify tasks in relationshi... topic with the new “official” discussion topic / download page.

Good work radeon!

So, after a few days of posting, does anyone have any feedback/problems? I put together the actors image app prety quickly so suspected there may be one or two issues. How are the users finding it?

Hey all! Check out the new TV Actor/ress downloader app. Major addition to inclue guest stars.

First post updated :)

i will have to have a look at there docs on the actor api but i would assume its much like the folders and backdrops. I should be able to pass in the actors name and get it to return the image. (i hope!!). Then, based on the sucess or failure of that, perhaps look to imdb as the “alternative source?

OK, so im wondering if someone can help, based on the discussion i had with Chipmonkey (see above) i decided to look into guest star actor images, sourced from thetvdb.

Now the help am after is just for someone to tell me if the thetvdb api allows this? I have looked on their forum and on their api wiki and have found an article saying they lost their wiki and had to revert to an age old backup so it was no longer up to date.

From what i can find, actor images only exist at the series level and no further (individual episodes). Is this info right or wrong?

Thanks!

Can you please change the Movie Actors tool to look one level deeper for .xml info.

I currently have my Boxsets setup as real folder with all movies inside of this folder.

Boxsets/Alien/Alien 3/mymovies.xml

I was wondering if some kinda of switch or change could be made to the movie actors to scan a directory structure like this as well.

Also I noticed when this app is done it leaves a temp file in the root of each directory, possible to add a automatic cleanup and erase this file when done?

Thank you.

Movie Actors script updated. Check main post for details. (it works along the same lines as the TV Actors and scans all dirs from its self for the relavant xml.)

Post updated to include tmdb downloaders :)

These apps are great.
I have massively increased my Actors images..I used the TMDB apps first and then the IMDB ones.
Then I had to go through them and resize some and remove any really small ones (say less than 10k).

The images from IMDB can vary from small to very large so Picasa is a really useful tool for this as it has face recognition and can run through the directory of images and crop them to portrait shots and bulk resize them.

Chipmonkey. I have had a look at picasa in the hope it may have some sort of command line I could make use of but i don’t seem to be able to find anything. Can you shed any light?

Re the change to the TV app to delete temp file. i will get back on it as soon as i can. Been in an accident which has stopped me for a while!

@RADEON – is there any way your programs can be a bit more selective on TV season backdrops etc. I have Doctor Who Season 5, but I am getting a lot of Season 3/Season 4 backdrops which don’t really go with Season 5, especially as the actors have changed ;–)

So how many apps are there now ??

Am I correct with this list (8)?

Hi Radeon, sorry to hear about your accident ,hope you're getting better.

That thing about the temp file is not important at all , I just mentioned it in case you didnt realise it was leaving it behind.

About Picasa I'm afraid I didn’t use a command line to process the IBN People images I just let your apps gather as many as possible from IMDB into a new folder and then deleted any that were less than about 10 or 20k as being too low quality.

The ones that were left varied from 10 or 20k to about 4000x4000 pixels and many were full body shots rather than close ups.

I used a folder to file renamer to rename all the images to the artist name and then loaded them into picasa. I left it for a while to generate its “Faces” view and that made it fairly speedy for me to look through them and let it trim the ones that needed it into portrait type images.

Then I used its bulk resize feature to make all the images a maximum of 800 pixels high which worked well because it didn’t resize images that were smaller than this.

Then I bulk converted them back to named folders and folder.jpgs and added the people images from my IBN folder (which were all from TMDB or TVDB) on top of them so they overwrote the IMDB ones if they were a duplicate.

It wasnt completely automated but it made it possible to process 1000’s of new images in a reasonable time.

One of the issues was that some of the images from IMDB have a white border around them as they are publicity shots and picasa was great at zooming in to a portrait view but sometimes left a bit of the border in the cropped image.

That left me with quite a bit of manual work to do afterwards scrolling through all the images and trimming the ones with bits of borders showing.

Although not completely automated it did enable me to batch process a huge number of images that would have taken much longer without picasa auto selecting the faces and producing passport style photos.

Thanks to your apps and with help from Picasa my IBN people folder went from less than 300MB to 730MB and the images are all of reasonable quality.

Ok, so a bit of a sensitive question for all. Literally adding insult to injury, my financial situation has changed dramatically and I'm looking at ‘alternative’ sources to help aid my situation. Do any of you guys think these applications are of any worth and would be willing to donate or shall I just shut the hell up? I never had any intention to ask but unfortunately things have changed.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

Personal side

Sorry to hear the bad news. As I have personally been out of work for over 6 years do to spinal problems, 3 spine surgeries and several other joint problems. I sympathize for you. I wish you the best of luck.

App Side / Donations

I do believe your work could be deserving of a donation button definitely.

If possible I would like to see all these available in a nice front end, pick what you want to search – movies or tv, select the directory to search and click Go. That would make it a little more user friendly and be a nice one file download.

Not sure what your capable of, but I think you could manage it. Might as well start building something, and put a donation button up. Keep your mind busy to avoid thinking about the pain as much. Best advice I can give you. :)

I'm no longer using local metadata since letting MB automate everything, so I don’t have .xml’s in my folders. Mediabrowser displays actors in the tab but often with no picture. Is there anyway I can still use this Movie Actor Downloader?

Hey Guys,

I have written one which downloads all of the images available from http://ibn.thehtpc.net/ if your are interested. that will get you a good 13k. :)

radeon and i release 2-3 new tools from me in some hours/days

Hey all! I have been in yet another accident!!! I nice metal bolt to the eye!! Going to be out of action for a few days. But Maximus1 is right, we are looking to bring some more apps to the table which will give more sources along with more options. I have also been in talks with BAS to look at bringing image downloads to his nice app. Perhaps, the four of us can bring a solid image app to the table sometime soon :-p

Can we perhaps bring the four of us together? I would love to work with you and Tobias on the new app of yours. It was just by chance that Maximus1 has been talking to me, and getting a bit of guidance on some new tools. We are soon going to have a pretty mean collection of tools; then to have them under one great front end would be great!

Radeon I'm having trouble with the TV Show Backdrop downloader. When I run it, it just flashes and closes.

Could the tvdb have changed something and broke the tool?

Sorry all, just got a new laptop finally from Samsung. But im on holiday for the next week so no access to my backups. I will have a look at the backdrop downloader as soon as i can.

hi radeon,

It’s good to see such good work on keeping the images by name project up to date. I'll be honest here in saying that the new community tracker has me completely lost. I don’t really know where to look to find the latest information. I'm trying to add actor/director information to my HTPC and a search led me to your thread. I have a few questions:

1) Are you still actively working on imagesbyname? Or is someone else maintaining it now? If that’s the case disregard the rest of my questions and please direct me to the most recent thread on this.

2) What exactly do your scripts do? It looks like it just scans the local system and grabs relevant images/information based on the movies or shows it can find.

3) If my assumption in #2 is correct, how do I get it to work with non-local storage? My HTPC is just a front-end for all my media, which is actually stored remotely in another system. So all of the mediabrowser configuration is stored locally on the HTPC, but the actual media files are stored on another system. I would need your script to scan my remote media storage system to save the metadata information on the HTPC.

4) Your website thehtpc.net (I think it’s yours, correct me if I'm wrong), also has an imagesbyname section that contains image packs. Are these obsolete now? Which should I use? The website packs or your scripts?

Thanks.

Yep, thehtpc.net isnt to do with me. Im not able to work on the downloaders at the moment due to pc problems and a few other things going on but the apps are still in dev and some new ones will be comming out soon. :)

Minor update, i am waiting on another(!!) laptop replacement from Samsung and dont want to put anything unrequired on the HTPC (nice a clean setup and i want to keep it that way). i will get to work on the fixes and other things as soon as i can.

Cheers,And sorry!