General question - Collection Images

[jasonmcroy]

I have been playing around more yesterday and today with creating more collections. However, I am sometimes finding it difficult to find already created 16:9 images to use for them. Some of the more popular collections are pretty easy to find on Fanart, TMDB or TVDB but it's not easy with some lesser known movies that I put into collections. It seems really easy to find poster images for collections but not 16:9.

I was curious what others may use or how you get your images or if you create your own. I have made a few of my own with some downloaded textless images and used those for "Christmas Movies" or "Halloween Movies" for example.

Tip: By the way, I finally created a workaround for a long awaited option to sort movies in my Apps by "Unwatched" using labels and the collections feature. It was a bit of work to mark all of my unwatched movies that way but it's done now. Plus I have to remove the label on any we then watch, but at least I can use channels exclusively now. At least I was able to sort them that way in the browser so I only see the ones I need to mark that way.

[babsonnexus]

This is what I do:

Folders for Library Collections?

@maddox, this is what it looks like with my custom art per user per topic: [Screenshot_20220331-075015] I currently have 36 Movie and 35 Show collections, so the last user has to scroll past quite a bit of stuff to get to their stuff.

[jasonmcroy]

Thanks. Yeah, I saw that on my initial search on the subject. That is what I do for my holiday or specific type of movie/show collections.

The collections I have like Batman Anthology or The Dark Knight Trilogy I could find after a bit of searching but I also have some oddball ones that I've had trouble with. I had to create my own for my Bruce Lee Ultimate Collection. There are plenty of poster images for it but I couldn't find any 16:9 ratio images. Mine looks pretty good and I am getting better at creating some of them. It is kind of fun as well.

I just spent some time adding labels to a lot of my movies like ones for Halloween, Horror, Animated, etc. Now that I have decided to stay in the Channels world for both TV and Movies I am really trying to customize to my liking. At least the Devs have given us options.

[tmm1]

You could put some posters or banners together into one image.

Virtual Channels, circa 2014

Some of you may know, but Channels is not the first DVR that @maddox and I have built. We have been working on our own media software for decades now. But earlier versions were private, and only used by our friends and family. I came across some screenshots from the first time I built Virtual Channels, in May 2014. Back then we used the third-gen Apple TVs, with various hacks to run our own software (this was before the App Store existed for tvOS): [image] [image]

[jasonmcroy]

Those look really cool! It reminds me of the home page folders that are on my Emby server setup (that may get uninstalled here soon if Channels keeps working so well! lol).

I am going to have to play around with this and create some. I am still learning Gimp right now.

[Blue]

I use the screen capture on an ios device. Then "edit" the screen shot photo to approximate the desired image size, i,e, 16:9 or ?. Then import the photo-image into channels. Also I use the ios Pages app to create a "page" with the "poster" title info and do a screen shot. Better than the generic Channels TV default poster.

[jasonmcroy]

That sounds interesting. Are you able to upload an example of one of yours? I love seeing others ideas on these type things.

[Blue]

Sample created in Pages and the screen capture - size to fit (approximately) using the “eye ball” method.