The VideoLAN Forums

I've tried to search around for a solution to this, but most of what I found are forum posts from a few years ago which give outdated instructions on how to set the downloading of album art to manual. There's no longer any option to set the download of album art to manual, and I would like it to be disabled since it's not particularly useful to me, and it litters the ~/.cache/vlc and ~/.cache/media-art with tons of thumbnails and album art. This is especially bad as I watch a lot of YouTube videos through YT, so even after a week or so after cleaning those folders, I get over 15000 of those files in the vlc folder...

~/.cache/media-art is not VLC.

I was also wondering the same thing. The 'Album art download policy' option is gone, and unchecking 'allow metadata network access' does nothing on both the latest stable and nightly versions. Even if I specify a placeholder using a <image> tag in the playlist entries, it still downloads the video thumbnail.

Is there really any way to disable this, particularly for YouTube videos?

So far I've tried making symbolic links from the cache links to /dev/null, and I haven't had the cached images appear again. It probably still downloads the thumbnails, which is quite annoying, but at least it won't clutter the HDD anymore.

Wholeheartedly agree here. This is just plain annoying. I have absolutely no desire for a user folder full of a ton of Youtube thumbnails in directories. Sure, you can set up system cleaning software (such as CCleaner) to purge unwanted cache stuff like that, but why on earth would Youtube thumbnails get saved in the first place? What's even the use for that, who would want to have that?