album cover cache

[ArtW]

Last night I had some issues with an updated album cover. I replaced one Folder.jpg with another, a correct one. The new image showed on the album page (large image on the right) and in the player but the old image kept showing on the grid whenever a list of albums was showing, either on the artist's page or the randomized home page.

First I tried rescanning/cleaning db with no effect. When I renamed the whole album folder (as a test) to something else the change took effect but as soon as I changed it back to the correct name the old cover showed again on the grid.
I deleted all files under /var/subsonic/thumbs and the old cover still showed, which made no sense to me. I renamed Folder.jpg to something not recognized as jpg and after a rescan I ended up with no album cover, which makes sense. I changed it back to jpg, renamed the album folder back and forth once more to "fool" subsonic into thinking it was a new album rescanned and eventually I ended up with correct album cover. I usually did rescan between any of these steps. I'm not sure what was the exact sequence of steps but this was a hair pulling experience.

Is there any fail safe way to ensure that the album covers are always up to date? What is the location of the cached images, if there is one (on linux)? If it is in the db, where is it and can I look at it? is it sql?

Thanks!

[3Dscrewer]

That sounds like the cover is imported into the MP3Tag and it is different to folder.jpg.
MP3Tag is also a free software to edit the Tags import, export the cover art and so on. Try it .... and let us know

[ArtW]

Hello,
Unfortunately that does not seem to be the the case because I always remove all embedded images before I place the files on my subsonic server to avoid this exact issue (and save a little space).
I did check for it anyway to make sure I did not miss it but there were no embedded images in the problematic album's files.

[3Dscrewer]

How different people are. I have a really huge database ~ 240.000 Titles and with Twins because Samplers and so on 270.000
I'm always importing the front cover 500x500 JPG and recalculated with XNVIEW, I have 25kb up to 90kb but most are lower than 50kb. That is not so much space but ending up in a lot of work

In my opinion it is not a good way to rename an album. It is always better (in most situations) to move that Album out of the path, rescan, cleanup DB, move back and rescan again. I have had a couple of similar situation when subsonic was showing the standard two colour picture. Imho the reason is because time stamp of the files, but in some cases subsonic will not show edited files as new after editing the Tags and/or renaming the files.

Oh, so far I know there is no cache for the cover, only the Artist information from last.fm is cached because requests to last.fm should be reduced.

[ArtW]

Well, the old image was cached somewhere, maybe in the browser, because it kept showing up even with the new jpg in place.
The only reason I renamed the album (folder) was to see it that would force the change and it did. I changed it back to what it should be because I like my data to be accurate but at the time that also caused the old image to show up again out of who knows where. Anyway, this is not an issue anymore but if this happens again I'll try your suggestion and make such changes outside of the library, scanning/cleaning the db in between.

p.s With 240k+ titles you are probably waiting for the multiple genre tag support as anxiously as I am. Maybe the next decade will bring something?

[G8DHE]

Another way is to simply change the last modified date of files and folders, the system then thinks they have changed and will rescan them, you don't have to modify the file contents as such at all.