BoxArt Studio 2.8.1

# BoxArt Studio — a portable cover-art tool for LaunchBox (English / Italian)

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share a small tool I’ve wanted for a long time: BoxArt Studio.

While organizing my LaunchBox collection, I kept running into covers with different sizes, awkward borders, very low resolutions, and inconsistent proportions. Arcade was particularly tricky: sometimes the image displayed by LaunchBox was a flyer or fanart, while an actual front cover was missing. Getting everything ready could mean a lot of repetitive work, one game at a time.

I’m not a programmer. I developed this application with the help of AI, starting from a practical idea and refining it through tests on my own collection. My aim was to make organizing cover art in LaunchBox simpler, with a clear preview and control over every change.

## What it does

- Reads your LaunchBox platforms and scans Box - Front and Box - Front - Reconstructed, including regional subfolders and custom folder paths.
- Offers a sequential multiple-cover review: view all variants, explicitly mark one KEEP, then move the others to backup or permanently delete them after confirmation. You can also keep all variants and skip the game. At least one valid cover must remain.
- Counts exact image dimensions and suggests the most common size as a target. You can also enter your own dimensions.
- Lets you review covers with Before / After previews, crop unwanted borders, resize exactly, or preserve proportions using padding with blurred, solid-color, or transparent fill.
- Shows games without a recognized front cover and lets you create a Reconstructed cover from their local images, with a thumbnail gallery showing image categories and dimensions.
- Lets you load a better source from your PC, a direct image URL, or a manually selected Google Images result in the integrated browser.
- Includes optional local AI upscaling with Faithful and Detailed models, plus a comparison preview. It runs locally and is marked as a GPU-intensive beta feature.
- Supports English and Italian, selectable from Lingua / Language, and remembers your preference.

## Keeping control of the changes

Saving a resize choice records it in the review; resizing is applied after the final summary is confirmed. Multiple-cover cleanup is separate: its clearly labeled buttons act immediately. Backup copies preserve the original relative paths and can be restored manually; permanent deletion creates no backup and cannot be undone. Close LaunchBox and Big Box before removing covers. If you move to another cover with unsaved changes, the app asks whether to save, discard, or stay on the current item.

Existing covers can be replaced with verified backups or saved as copies in Reconstructed. Newly created covers go to Reconstructed, leaving their source images untouched. You can save and reopen review sessions, and restore completed backup sessions using their logs.

## Getting started

Download the attached ZIP, extract the whole folder, and run BoxArtStudio.exe.
It’s a portable Windows 64-bit application and does not need a Python installation. The English and Italian READMEs explain the workflow, requirements, backups, and limitations.

Normal resizing does not require AI. Optional upscaling needs compatible Vulkan GPU drivers, and the integrated browser uses Microsoft Edge WebView2. AI can introduce artifacts, especially in faces and lettering, so the previews are there to help you decide whether a result is worth keeping.
I’m sharing this as a community project. It is not an official LaunchBox application. The upscaling engines and models are existing third-party projects, with their licenses included in the package.
I’d love feedback from people with different collections, particularly on the workflow, image matching, and anything that feels confusing or repetitive. My hope is that this makes the cover-cleanup process a little easier for someone else too.

Thanks for taking a look!