Tree / Self Hosting / Movies & TV Shows / Kodi
Movie Director Thumbs
A Kodi resource addon with director thumbnails.
- Status
- Green · Published
- Type
- addon
- Era
- pre-AI, handmade
Released on the Kodi forum as a resource addon with about 137,000 thumbs, which puts faces into Kodi's director slot.
In this article
An empty slot in almost every skin
Kodi has a directors container for movies, and most skins, Estuary included, reserve a place for a director thumb there. It showed nothing, or a plain fallback image. Actors have thumbs that Kodi scrapes. Directors had none, and Kodi core offered no way to fill the slot. I was surprised that nothing native had appeared in all the Kodi years, although forum members had sketched ideas.
The one alternative was SkinHelper's webservice. It needs SkinHelperService and a live internet connection, it has no local caching, it is too slow for wall views, and it returns random aspect ratios that skins then stretch.
The goal: faces for directors, loaded locally and fast, in a uniform 2:3 shape, with one line of skin code. My larger hope was Kodi core integration, so that director thumbs could be scraped like actor thumbs.
A folder keyed by name
Movie Director Thumbs is a resource addon with the id resource.images.moviedirectorthumbs: a flat folder of .jpg files, keyed by name. The filename is the director's name exactly as Kodi shows it, which is the name on TheMovieDB. The skin builds the path from the list label.
The skin change is one line, a value with the condition Container.Content(directors) added to the variable that handles the poster or thumb. In Estuary that is InfoWallThumbVar in Variables.xml. I offered ready paste-in files for Estuary on Krypton and Leia, and advised placing the line first in the variable, because later conditions can exclude it.
Installing takes two downloads, and that is on purpose:
- Install the empty addon, about 0.5 MB, from its ZIP in Kodi.
- Download the collection, about 2 GB packed and 4.5 GB unpacked, extract it, and move the thumbs by hand into the resources folder of the installed addon.
- Edit the skin file, or ask the skin author to add the line. A skin update removes your edit.
Thumbs follow simple conventions: 2:3 aspect, at most 1000x1500, .jpg only, face roughly centred. The source order is TheMovieDB, then IMDb, then image search. Aka names get a copy, because TheMovieDB sometimes swaps main and aka names.
From 1,100 names to every director on TheMovieDB
This is pre-AI work: community work. I wrote the addon, the skin integration, the conventions and the tutorials, and put together a base pack of more than 1,100 directors, about 70 MB. The first plan was that users would fill the gaps themselves and share them. Users wrote instead asking for one big pack out of the box.
I lacked the knowledge to do that myself, so I looked for help. rschiks wrote the bulk script, in PowerShell, which reached all director thumbs available on TheMovieDB and named the files correctly for Kodi. That changed the project from a starter pack into a complete collection. I gave him all the credit for that step, and I still do. The resources themselves are powered by TheMovieDB.
The result was about 137,000 thumbs, of which about 20,000 are real portraits and about 117,000 are fallback images. In my own library I found no picture at all for only 1.2 % of directors. Captain_Pike, who gave valuable feedback, had 7 missing among just over 800.
The fallback files have a purpose. They are a marker from the idea phase: a dummy means TheMovieDB has the person but no image, and no file at all means the addon has no entry, because of special characters, a new director or a changed name. A dummy also stops some skins from showing the previous thumb in that slot. Two versions existed, with and without dummies.
Support came from users more than from releases. Captain_Pike added it to AEON MQ8 Leia Mod himself, bsoriano announced support in Amber, and nordicguy integrated it himself in Aeon Nox: SiLVO, with limitations, and used it in a personal Aeon Tajo. Angelinas pointed me to the SkinHelper alternative, and docwra suggested taking the idea to Kodi.
Why it never reached the repository
Special characters. Installing an addon falsifies special characters in filenames, the same fault as in Red Carpet. There it touches about a dozen images, here hundreds. That is why the collection ships apart from the addon.
Size and the repository. The character problem and the file size together keep this addon out of the official repository for good. The convenience of Red Carpet was never available here.
Kodi core. Integration was the real aim, and it did not happen. I had never made a pull request and asked for someone to walk me through a first one. No pull request came out of the thread.
An improvisation that stayed
The speed and the look came out as planned. Thumbs load locally, in wall views too, in a uniform 2:3 shape, and browsing by director finally shows faces. One line of skin code is about as light as an integration gets.
The rest of the plan did not arrive: the community fill-in, the road to the official repository, and core integration. It stays what I called it myself, an improvisation: a bulk download from TheMovieDB, packed as a resource addon for outside use. As far as I know it is still the only way to show director images in real time without a helper fetching them from the web.
When you cannot do the decisive step yourself, finding the right person is the work. Without rschiks's script this would have stayed a pack of 1,100 names.
Connected
Next: Library Restoration