HOW-TO:Reduce XBMC disk space

As your library and usage of XBMC grows, so does the disk space storage taken up by XBMC's various settings and files. If you have a device with a low amount of internal disk space storage (8GB or less), such as an ATV2, Raspberry Pi, various Android boxes such as Pivos XIOS DS, this can be a problem. And the same goes when running XBMC from a smaller sized USB flash drive or SD (Secure Digital) card. This how-to will show ways to reduce the space used, as well as reclaim space from files that are no longer needed.

XBMC stores data mainly in the userdata folder or the parent folder of userdata, "XBMC".

Cleanup unused cached images
XBMC does not automatically prune old images that are no longer used. For example, if you remove a movie from the library then the poster and fanart will still be saved in XBMC's userdata folder. Until XBMC has an internal method of pruning these files you can use the highly versatile Texture Cache Maintenance utility to remove unused images.

Actor images
If you don't care to download pictures of Actors for when you are browsing or looking up actor information in XBMC, you can turn this off. Doing so can often save a few hundred megabytes of disk space storage, depending on how versatile your video library is.

Go into XBMC -> Settings -> Video -> Library -> and disable the Download actor thumbnails when adding to library option.

Limit the size of cached images
Whenever XBMC downloads images from the internet, or even loads local images saved along side your media, it caches these images inside of userdata/Thumbnails/. By default, large images are scaled down to the default values shown below, but they can be sized even smaller to save additional space. Often, depending on the skin and TV you use, you can resize images without any noticeable decrease in quality. Smaller images can also speed up the GUI on low-power devices.


 * 1) Create a plain text file (no rich text formatting, don't use .doc, etc) and save it as advancedsettings.xml. Make sure that the file extension is ".xml" and not ".txt" or ".xml.txt".
 * 2) Cut and paste this into your new plain text file:
 * 3) Change the two sizes to a lower value, depending on your needs and how much resolution you need for your skin/TV. See "Tag details" below for more info.
 * 4) Save this file in your userdata folder:
 * 1) Save this file in your userdata folder:

Tag details:

Move cached images to another drive
Path substitution is another advancedsettings.xml tag. If you simply need more space for XBMC's files but don't wish to limit the image quality then you can use path subs to relocate the images to another drive. The cached images in the Thumbnails folder takes up the most amount of space of all the different XBMC files, so using pathsubs on that folder alone is often all you need to do. It's even possible to use a network file share path, but it is recommended that you use another local drive, if possible, for performance reasons.

If you have not made an advancedsettings.xml file before, see the example in the above section .

Limit add-on rollback
Another advancedsettings.xml tag that can be used is. XBMC saves old copies of add-ons in case you ever need to revert to a previous version, in case there was a bug in the new version or the user did not like one of the changes. Old add-on packages don't normally take up a lot of space, and the default max size before XBMC starts deleting old packages is 200 megabytes. This setting is mainly to allow a user to increase the number of old versions saved, but it can be used to lower them.

Since this only saves 200MBs of data, it is generally not needed to change this setting.

If you have not made an advancedsettings.xml file before, see the example in the above section .