Quality of life features

[Glauco Fox]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to bring up a few quality-of-life improvements. I’m aware that there are plugins and workarounds floating around, but none of them really provide a seamless, reliable, native experience.
These suggestions are focused on filling those gaps.

 

1. On-demand Auto Download (Art & Metadata)

When selecting a game that has no media/art, LaunchBox could automatically trigger a download in the background.
This avoids the need for manual bulk downloads and keeps the library feeling “alive” as you browse.
Ideally configurable (on/off, or only on first selection).

 

2. Minimal Art Download Option

A lightweight download mode focused on essentials only.

Example behavior:
- 1 image per category (front box, screenshot, maybe clear logo)
- Skip duplicates, variations, or excessive media

Useful for:

• Saving disk space
• Faster scraping
• Cleaner libraries without overwhelming amounts of assets
• light builds

 

3. Local Cache for Games (Network-Friendly)

Many of us store ROMs on a NAS/server.

Current flow:
Fetch over network → extract locally → play

Suggested improvement:
Before fetching from the network, check a configurable local cache folder
If the game was already extracted before, reuse it

Benefits:

• Faster load times
• Reduced network usage
• Better experience for large compressed collections

4. Optimize Lazy Loading for Large Libraries

Avoid loading the entire library and all associated media upfront.
Instead, load games and assets progressively as the user navigates.

This would:

• Reduce UI freezes and stuttering
• Improve startup time significantly
• Make large libraries feel much more responsive

 

These features would significantly improve usability for people with big collections or remote storage setups, while also helping keep things efficient and responsive.

Would love to hear thoughts or refinements from others.

[C-Beats]

#2 is already a user choice thing, and any automated media download does already grab a limited set of images. You want less images grabbed, just grab less images. Use the settings provided and you can tell LB to only ever grab 1 of image group.

#4 also already happens. Only thing not lazy loaded is the actual library details/metadata. This is mostly because depending on settings you need the entire library loaded to be able to use certain features anyway. There's been talks about eventually moving to Sqlite like we did with the GamesDB and that'd reduce the need for a lot of that since the data can be read from disk far faster than the XML files at the moment. We just need to make sure we have a solid plan on how to do that since typically we do our best to make it possible for users to downgrade, and without tools to help with that process that simply wouldn't be possible to downgrade from a Sqlite version to an XML version (or at least not without saving to both formats which is cumbersome).