Media and scraping

Your media always come first

APIExpose finds, organizes and projects game media: screenshots, logos and wheels, boxarts, fanarts, videos, manuals, magazines, maps and theme media. But your files take priority — place them here and APIExpose will use them before any downloaded media:

media\user\systems\<system>\games\<game>\

Media for marquee, topper and instruction card

Display plugins (MarqueeManager…) read their media from the local store. To customize a game, the useful locations are:

artwork\marquee\marquee.png
artwork\marquee\screenmarquee.png
artwork\marquee\dmd.png          (or dmd.gif, dmd2.gif)
artwork\marquee\topper.jpg
artwork\ic\ic.png                (instruction card)
artwork\fanart.png
ui\wheels\wheel.png

To override an entire system's media:

media\user\systems\<system>\

If no local system media exists, APIExpose looks in the current EmulationStation theme, then in es-theme-carbon — it does not walk through every installed theme.

Automatic scraping

APIExpose scrapes locally first, then queries ScreenScraper only when needed. Everything is driven from the ES menu AUTO SCRAPING MANAGER.

The current game's entry can update without reloading the whole list, but only on a real visible change: image, logo or thumbnail added/replaced, localized text in the right language, freshly scraped video. Raw metadata or wrong-language text does not trigger a live refresh.

Texts and languages

APIExpose manages localized entry texts: description, genre, date, developer, publisher, players, language, region, family.

Change EmulationStation's language without fear

When the ES language changes, APIExpose realigns the gamelists in the new language, and invalidates in-flight remote scrapes to avoid reusing results from the old language.