boxart on external hdd instead of sd card

moonston333

can i store all my boxart for my games on an external hard drive instead of in emulationstation downloaded images on the sd card. ive already got my game on external just wanted to know if i can store boxart and possible videos there aswell instead of sd card

thanks

EctoOne

You can, you just need to edit your gamelist.xml for every system and change the path in the <image> tag (if you're using videos, also change the paths for <video> and <marquee>). You can use a relative path if you want to use a subfolder in your rom folder. Like <image>./_images/yourgame-image.png</image>.
If you want you can also move you gamelist.xml's to your game folders, saves you the trouble to scrape everything again if you need to reinstall RetroPie for some reason.

moonston333

so i cant just drag and drop say a megadrive folder with all images in and it will show how do i point the path to th external drive what do i change. and do i just change the path from sd card to hdd or do i have to write loads of stuff for each game is there a tutorial on this

thanks

backstander

@moonston333
There are several ways you can approach this. I guess it depends on how you have it setup now with your ROMs on your external hard drive. It also depends on which scraper you're using because they can use different directories to store the boxart.

If you use Steven Selph's Scraper, I believe the images are stored in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images so you could just make a Symbolic Links from there to a directory on your external hard drive and be done with it. I'm not sure where EmulationStation's Built-In Scraper stores boxart images but I think they're in a different directory.

If you're using one of those 3rd party ran in Windows Scrapers, most of them just make a "downloaded_images" or "images" directory inside of your system's specific rom directory (example: snes/images/) so you should scrape right on the external hard drive and be done with it. Just make sure the gamelist.xml file is in the system's specific rom directory (example: snes/gamelist.xml).

moonston333

ive got my roms in retropie-mount/roms

so snes is
retropie-mount/roms/snes

can i just make a folder in snes folder called images or boxart and drag and drop png or jpeg files in there instead of scraping as i have all boxart for my emulators.

if so do i need to change anything in the gameslist xml or anything else so the art shows up from the hdd

backstander

@moonston333

if so do i need to change anything in the gameslist xml or anything else so the art shows up from the hdd

The gamelist.xml file has the relative path to all the images (and videos). Depending on where you moved/copied the boxart from, you'll probably need to edit every image path in gamelist.xml.

If you use something in Windows like the Universal XML Scraper to get all the images and it makes an gamelist.xml file for you and you can use that in your retropie-mount/roms/snes.

There are other ways to accomplish this but I'm not sure what the best would be for your setup.