Scraping
Scraping enriches your indexed media with extra metadata and artwork. Media indexing finds your files and creates the records; scraping fills those records with details like cover art, descriptions, developers, and genres.
Scrapers only update media that already exists in your library. They never create, move, or delete your games, and a scrape never changes the files on disk.
Core's built-in scrapers read metadata and artwork that already exist on your device. They do not download anything from the internet. To fetch artwork, scrape it first with a tool like MiSTer Companion or Skraper, then run a Zaparoo scrape to import the results.
Running a scrape
Start a scrape from the Zaparoo App under Settings, or from the TUI under Manage media.
You can scrape your whole library or pick specific systems. Only one scrape runs at a time, and scraping cannot run while a media database update is in progress. A running scrape can be paused, resumed, or cancelled.
By default a scrape skips media that has already been scraped, so repeat runs are quick. A force (full re-scrape) processes everything again, refreshes existing metadata, and cleans up references to artwork files that have since been removed.
Scrapers
Core currently includes two scrapers, both based on the EmulationStation folder conventions used by distributions like Batocera, RetroBat, ES-DE, RetroDECK, and RetroPie. Both run on all platforms wherever the matching files are present.
gamelist.xml
The gamelist.xml scraper imports EmulationStation metadata from a gamelist.xml file in each system's games folder. This is the richer of the two scrapers and brings in both text metadata and artwork.
It imports:
- Tags: developer, publisher, year, genre, rating, player count, plus per-file region and language. These feed into the tag system for matching and filtering.
- Descriptions and the game's ScreenScraper ID.
- Artwork and media paths: box art (2D, 3D, side, back), screenshots, title screens, marquees, wheels and logos, fan art, maps, plus videos and PDF manuals.
When a gamelist.xml entry does not list an image directly, the scraper falls back to looking in the system's media/ folder, the same place the media-folder scraper reads.
media-folder
The media-folder scraper imports artwork from EmulationStation-style media/ folders without needing a gamelist.xml. Use it when you have media folders but no gamelist, or to pick up artwork a gamelist did not list.
It only imports images. It does not read descriptions, tags, videos, or manuals.
For each game, it looks under <system folder>/media/ in convention-named subfolders and matches files by the game's filename. For example, for SNES/Super Mario World.sfc it looks for files like:
SNES/media/images/Super Mario World.png
SNES/media/boxart/Super Mario World.jpg
SNES/media/screenshot/Super Mario World.png
Common subfolders include images, boxart (and cover, box2dfront), boxart3d, screenshot, thumbnail, marquee, wheel (and logo), fanart, titleshot, and map. Supported image types are PNG, JPG, JPEG, and WEBP. Games in subfolders are matched against the mirrored path first, then the flat filename.
A force re-scrape also removes image references that follow this naming convention when their file is no longer on disk.
What scraping produces
Scraped text values become tags, which Core uses to choose between similar media and which you can filter on when launching by title. Scraped artwork is shown in the Zaparoo App when you browse your library.
For the full metadata field mapping and the API methods used to start scrapes and read scraped data, see the scraper subsystem reference.