Thumbnails
How box art and screenshot images are downloaded, matched, and displayed.
Image Sources
All images come from libretro-thumbnails on GitHub. Three image types are available per system:
- Box art – cover art / box art
- In-game screenshots – captured during gameplay
- Title screens – title screen captures
Downloading Images
From the metadata page (Settings > Game Data):
- Per-system download – download images for a single system
- Download All – batch download images for all systems
- Cancellable – imports can be cancelled with real-time progress updates
- Auto-deletes cloned repos after matching to save disk space
Image Matching
The app uses smart multi-tier matching to connect ROM files with their images:
Both PNG and JPG images are supported. The matching logic checks for both extensions.
- Exact match – ROM display name matches an image filename directly
- Tag-stripped match – region and revision tags are stripped for looser matching (e.g., “Super Mario World (USA)” matches “Super Mario World”)
- Version-stripped match – version numbers are also removed for even looser matching
- On-demand download – if no local match is found but an image is known to exist in the libretro-thumbnails catalog, it is fetched in the background and appears on the next page load
Arcade ROMs use internal codenames (e.g., sf2.zip), so the app automatically translates codenames to display names before matching.
Screenshot Gallery
The game detail page displays a screenshot gallery with labeled images:
- Title Screen – shown with a “Title Screen” label
- In-Game – shown with an “In-Game” label
Box Art Swap
On the game detail page, you can pick alternate region-variant cover art. The feature shows all available boxart variants for the game (e.g., US, European, Japanese covers) and lets you choose which one to display. Your choice is preserved across metadata clears.
Thumbnail Counts
The metadata page shows per-system thumbnail counts, reflecting how many games in your library have box art available.