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+--- Thread: How to get Collections to use locally stored artwork (/t-how-to-get-collections-to-use-locally-stored-artwork)
How to get Collections to use locally stored artwork - Ned - 2025-07-30
Longtime Kodi user, just starting to use Jellyfin so still struggling with a few things.
I have all my data set up locally - no internet scrapers enabled in Jellyfin.
This is all set up to work in Kodi. Thankfully, so far most things have "just worked" in Jellyfin as well.
Some exceptions are Movie Sets (I think you call them Collections) artwork, and Actors artwork.
I have all Actors in .actors folders within the media library. Seems Jellyfin simply doesn't support that, and there's an old feature request to add support, so I'm guessing support isn't coming soon. Shame. Keeping things compatible with the far-more-widely-used Kodi specs would be good I would think, and making a semi-offline compatible media streamer that still needs the internet to work properly seems counter-intuitive to me. So I guess that one is answered - for the time being, Kodi and Jellyfin are incompatible with respect to artist images, and Jellyfin artist images can't work offline. If I get the time I might see how feasible it is to make an artwork-getting plugin that looks in the .actors folders first before failing over to the TMDB scraper one, but I don't have enough experience with Jellyfin to know if that's feasible yet, but it seems like a neat way to handle Kodi compatibility without any core modifications.
But anyway... onto Collections artwork. I can't find any useful info about Collections Artwork. The general answer seems to be to "use the TMDB Collections plugin" - which obviously uses the internet, so I can't, and it seems the way sets and collections have been implemented in Kodi and Jellyfin is just fundamentally different in pointlessly minor ways that make any shared data between the two unusable (they seem to store essentially the same data in different XML formats and use different filenames for images etc.)
I already have all my Movie Sets information stored in the applicable NFO files, and the artwork downloaded and stored locally, using the long-term Kodi "standard" (via plugin) of:
/Media Folder/Movie Set Name/fanart.jpg and poster.jpg
/Media Folder/Movie Set Name/Movie One/
/Media Folder/Movie Set Name/Movie Two/
etc
I understand Kodi has moved to using a central folder for sets (collections) which is a terrible idea, but fortunately there's a Kodi plugin that keeps using the images stored in set folders in the actual media (the only place it really makes sense to have them - why would I want a folder with the movies, and then a separate folder somewhere else with the collection images etc in it? Makes no sense...)
So my question is - is there a plugin or way to make collections and their artwork in Jellyfin work with Kodi compatible data?