What happens with the old artist pictures when you replace them with new ones?
Are they deleted? Or are they still there somewhere on your HD/SSD, taking up space for eternity?
It would be good if they could be cleaned up with a simple mouseclick. I’ve seen this function in other databases.
Yes. See this thread
In a similar vein, if you delete an album, the artwork will remain.
It’s not 1989 anymore.
An 800x800 pixel album cover is a few hundred kB.
Say half a meg to simplify.
A 10 TB drive is $200.
So the album cover costs 0.01 cents to store.
I care about wastage up to a point, but not hundreds of a cent.
It’s not about money, it’s about bloat and sloppy house keeping.
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… isn’t the right term which could help a little to understand why Roon doesn’t remove those images. When you set a different artist image you add a picture. My guess the philosophy here is: the user shall not locally alter the Roon metadata and Roon metadata always stays (I suppose as long as there’s a reference to the artist in your library - don’t know about that); probably as a point of reference and as a kind of fallback.
Since Roon keeps its image metadata with the core I do wonder, too, if changing the current behaviour would bring any benefit. Dedicated cores (ROCK, Nucleus) usually have enough free space on their database SSD anyway.
But let’s say one has changed 100,000 artist images and the original images were 500 KB on average so we talk about ca. 50 GB “wasted” space in total. To get that back the implementation would have to get changed on the Core and maybe at the backend as well. And there will be other trade-offs.
Just for example: if the Roon image is no longer available locally, there’d be no reference picture available in the edit screens. So every time the respective tab in an edit screen gets opened, Roon would have to retransmit at least a thumbnail of its version of the picture. This creates a different kind of “waste” in network traffic (*) and could introduce delay when opening the tab mentioned.
BTW what you can do is clean up the image cache of Roon clients.
(*) @mikeb … this would be about money, BTW 
Then go to the gym and get a cleaner.
Or are we talking about something else? 
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In my case, I’ve deleted the album and no longer wish for it to be in my db at all, including the now orphaned pictures. It’s not about the disk storage, it’s about maintaining a lean, fast, healthy db.
Every modern db I’ve worked with has a routine to reclaim whitespace, the void left over by removing an object. It seems Roon should tag the images of deleted tracks/albums/artists and remove them as part of the ‘clean up library’ function. It need not be real-time nor does it need to be difficult. The relationship between an ‘object’ (track, album, artist) and it’s respective images is already known, adding a scheme extension to include a new bit to tag an image is ‘keep’ or ‘remove’ seems logically quite simple.
But that wasn’t the case the OP described. References for things not present in the library should get a different treatment, or some treatment at all, as you’ve requested.
Ah, I did misread the post. Thx.
On the same issue, does Roon backup all referenced files only?
If I delete the database and restore it, will the stale images be removed?