Moving Gamelists and Downloaded Images from SD Card to Portable HDD

[omen_peter]

Hi all.

I only ever use the internal EmulationStation scraper to scrape my games (I just like the fact you can go through one game at a time and double check it's correct before moving on - ha!). Of course, this means that my gamelists and downloaded images are saved within the configs folder on the SD card here:
configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists/<system>
configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images/<system>

What I would love to do, once I’ve fully scraped a system, is to move the gamelist and the downloaded images for that system to my portable HDD, so that it a) clears some space on the SD card, and b) means if my SD card fails I won’t lose all my scraped data as it will be on the HDD (I do back up regularly so it’s not a huge issue).

The games on my system are 'final', so I won't be adding games to it, hence why moving it once fully scraped I should never have to re-scrape due an additional game.

This is where I am stuck. I understand from reading the docs that I can simply move the location of my gamelist to the relevant roms folder (so it appears under /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<system>), but I’m not sure how to amend the gamelist itself to allow it to pick up a new location for the downloaded images.

Here is an example of a game in my NeoGeo Pocket gamelist, currently stored on the SD card:

<gameList>
	<game>
		<path>./Baseball Stars (Japan, Europe) (En,Ja).ngp</path>
		<name>Baseball Stars - Pocket Sports Series</name>
		<desc>Baseball Stars is sports game about baseball. Game is similar to Baseball Stars from NES but has less realistic characters and gameplay's style. You manage own baseball team and play in series of matches. Game has typical baseball rules - one player throws the ball, second hits the ball, someone else grabs it etc. Each character has own statistics, like stamina.</desc>
		<image>~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/ngp/Baseball Stars (Japan, Europe) (En,Ja)-image.jpg</image>
		<releasedate>19981028T000000</releasedate>
		<developer>SNK</developer>
		<publisher>SNK</publisher>
		<genre>Sports</genre>
		<players>2</players>
	</game>

So, let’s say I create a folder called downloaded_images within the roms folder (so /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ngp/downloaded_images), what do I need to change between the <image> tags in the gamelist to make it pick up the image?

For the example above, would this work:

<image>/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ngp/downloaded_images/Baseball Stars (Japan, Europe) (En,Ja)-image.jpg<image>

If it would, I can do a find and replace in the gamelist using notepad++ and I’m sorted!

One other question: I’m going to do this over time, moving things as and when they are ready. Will this matter if some of the gamelists are on the HDD, and some still on the SD card?

Thanks and appreciate any help/guidance.

[mitu]

You can add the scraped image path as a fully qualified path (i.e. /home/pi/..), EmulationStation will be able to read it fine. You can easily use search/replace in any editor to the relative path (starting with ~/.emulationstation) with a the full path to where you're going to copy the artwork.

Will this matter if some of the gamelists are on the HDD, and some still on the SD card?

No, it's ok.

[omen_peter]

@mitu thank you as always! Will give this a go.