There's no 'autodiscovery' process running before or outside EmulationStation. The gamelists are written by EmulationStation when stopping/restarting (by default, but you can choose in the option to write it immediately). The location of the gamelists for most of your system (in the games' folder) indicates you either ran a scraper outside of EmulationStation or you copied the games folders from another system (including the system's gamelist.xml). That shouldn't be a problem though.

Did you restart EmulationStation after adding the kidgame tags and before turning on 'kidmode' ? I'm wondering if there isn't any bug that when turning on kid mode doesn't save the metadata on exit (because of the kidmode being selected).
Did you modify the options for metadata saving/reading in EmulationStation ?

@mitu said in How shutdown Retropie in Kid-Mode ? (or is Kiosk mode needed for this) ?:

@purpledragon478 said in How shutdown Retropie in Kid-Mode ? (or is Kiosk mode needed for this) ?:

By default the start menu is disabled for the 'Kid' UI mode, but you can enable it. To do this, complete the following steps:
...

EmulationStation has now an option in the UI Settings menu to control whether to show the menu or not in the Kid mode, so there's no need to edit any configuration file. It's been added more than 1 year ago.

Oh sorry, I didn't realise that. I had experienced this problem with the start menu myself just recently, and tried looking for a solution online but to no avail (that's when I found this unanswered question). I hadn't even tried looking through the start menu for a solution tbh because I assumed that if I couldn't find a solution online, then it must just be impossible to access the start menu in the 'Kid' UI mode. So when I stumbled across this solution while just browsing through the RetroPie menu for any general useful settings, I was really excited, and thought I'd come back and answer this question in order to help anyone else who was also having difficulty with it.

I had planned to look through the start menu settings next to see if I could find anything useful there too, so I guess I should've held off on posting this answer until I had done that, since I would've discovered this more efficient solution then. Oh well, at least both these methods are available here online now for anyone who is still having difficulty with this (and who, like myself, hadn't bothered looking through the start menu for a solution). Plus I'm just glad to learn that there is this more user-friendly method of enabling the start menu in the 'Kid' UI mode.

So for anyone reading this who still wants to know how to do enable the start menu in 'Kid' mode, complete the following steps instead:

First make sure you're in the regular 'Full' UI mode Press the start button to bring up the start menu Click 'UI Settings' Scroll down to the option 'Disable Start Menu in Kid Mode' and set it to 'Off' Exit the start menu

Then you can enable the 'Kid' UI Mode and the start menu will be available. You don't have to first turn off the Raspberry Pi and then turn it back on again, like with the first method I posted.