questions about cache

[buffotoad]

In my c:\xlobby\cache\, there are 465 files using 25 mb of disk space. It seems like this directory contains copies of the photos that I am able to view when running xlobby.

There is also c:\xlobby\cache\categories\, which contains 220 files and uses 10 mb of disk space. This directory contains pictures of the cd covers for the cd's that I can play when running xlobby.

1) What is the purpose of these two directories?

2) I am always looking for ways to conserve hard drive space. These directories seem to contain copies of files that exist in other directories on my hard drive. Is there a way to avoid the duplication and save some hard drive space?

3) I have added and deleted many photos and cd covers during the time that I have been working with xlobby. Has this resulted in unecessary files in these cache directories? Should I delete the contents of the cache directories and re-generate them? If so, how would I do that?

Thanks for any help...

[joebob2006]

when xlobby creates thumbnails for databases, it stores the thumbnails in the cache folder for easy access.

say, for example, you have all your media on a remote server which you access with your laptop or whatever. the albumart and covers and so on should all be stored remotely with whatever media it belongs with, but xlobby will create local thumbnails. this way if your remote media were to somehow be unavailable (turned off, whatever), the thumbnails would still be there because they would be stored locally in the cache.

the real purpose of this is speed though. by storing a local version of all the information (info is in the databases, images in cache) when you goto a screen (ie, music), it doesnt have to access all that info across the network which would be slow.

cache is used regardless of your setup, but if all your media and xlobby are all on one machine, then it doesnt really do much good.

if you find that your albumart and whatnot are of low quality, its because they are resized and compressed in the cache to save space and to speed things up. if this bothers you, you can disable caching, and refresh your databases and it xlobby will use the original albumart images instead.

i cant remember how to disable caching, since i use it a lot, but search the forums and you should be able to find it