Customizable Scraping

[Daniel Webster]

Metadata & media scraping is an inexact science at best and the Launchbox devs have generally struck a good balance. With good romsets that have sensible naming conventions, scraping is generally a breeze, and false positives minimal.

However the wild west reality of the romscene means that conventions can vary a lot, with some platforms in particular having filename standards that Launchbox struggles with - looking at you, Amiga. This means a lot of manual tweaking and rescraping which can be a major hassle.

This isn’t an insolvable problem, but as it stands the scraper is very exacting in matching filenames to titles, and is easily thrown off by excess characters or bracketed information. It’s also quite strict on platforms; I’ve noticed missing media and metadata can often be found by temporarily changing a title’s platform and rescraping. Of course, the trade-offs in allowing rougher matches would be more false positives, and potentially scraping media from the wrong port, which could both be problematic as well.

Seems to me the best way to address this issue would be to allow users more control over scraper behaviour, giving the flexibility to allow for wildcards, partial title matches, platform-agnostic scraping, etc., while retaining the current behaviour as the “default” or recommended setting. This could be via a horizontal slider control in the wizard with 4-5 settings ranging from “loose” to “strict” behaviour, Even better, have a “custom” setting as well which allows more fine grained control via checkboxes and such.

This would be fairly straightforward to implement and would solve an incredible amount of time for those of us with large collections.