Thanks, I was not aware of that feature. I just used it, and it will help considerably, though I do have a few suggestions. As for the images not updating properly, I think I found the cause. I think it's an issue with how the nvidia shield mounts network drives; I'll be asking about it on their forums shortly. When I edit the contents of a file on my NAS, the shield's mounted version would not update, but creating or deleting a file does. It works properly the other way around. Editing a file on the shield's mount updates the NAS copy. That explains why I was having trouble editing the .xml files: any changes I made were not being passed onto the shield unless the file was created or deleted. I'm not sure how exactly, but I think that's why modified images were appearing blank. While playing around with the issue, I somehow made a desynced txt file that the shield saw as 40kb but completely empty, while 20kb on the NAS.
But anyway, I have a couple suggestions for migrating files to the android version:
-When exporting, have an advanced option to NOT copy game files, instead modify the initial part of the directory. Could also apply to images, if you want to store them in another location. To be honest, I think this only really applies to the nvidia shield. I don't know of any other android devices that are able to easily mount network drives. I've only got a basic understanding of networking, so I could be wrong.
Example:
\\MY-SERVER\Roms\NES\USA\file.zip -> storage/MY-SERVER/Roms/NES/USA/file.zip
\\MY-SERVER\Roms\NES\ROMHACK\file.zip -> storage/MY-SERVER/Roms/NES/ROMHACK/file.zip
-When picking image categories to import, add an option to substitute another image category. In my case, I wanted to use Box-3D on the android app in place of the Box-Front. The 3D boxes are PNG and use transparency, so I couldn't simply swap files. I got around this by backing up both categories, deleting all Box-Front, moving Box-3D into the Box-Front directory, rescanning the entire library's media, exporting to android (which also created thumbnails of the 3D boxes), restoring the backup, and rescanning again.
-I noticed that after exporting to android, one line in the Nintendo Game Boy Color.xml file (first entry, for the platform description) kept the windows folder structure. I have no idea if this makes any difference, just thought I'd point it out.
<Folder>\\My-SERVER\Games\ROMS\Nintendo Handheld\Gameboy Color</Folder>