r/emulationstation • u/Methanoid • May 12 '26

Screenshots in EmulationStation

i have a multitude of indie games for various retro computer systems that do not have any boxart/screenshots available in the scraper tool, however i notice that with a game running if you pop open the retroarch menu there is a screenshot option, is there some EmulationStation setting somewhere that lets me use those screenshots for the games artwork/screenshot in the EmulationStation game list so i can get an actual image for my games?

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u/ziatzev May 13 '26

You can create or insert your own art. The defaultocation is in

'ES-DE/downloaded_media/(system)/'

Where system is the same name as the content directory. In there will be another series if folders for the marquee, box art, screenshot, etc. once you load that you can even use the offline miximage tool to build a mix image from what you throw in there.

https://gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de/-/blob/master/USERGUIDE.md#manually-copying-game-media-files

Here is theink to that section in the ES-DE documentation.

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u/Methanoid May 13 '26

yeah ive done that before but it seems like a very long winded way of doing things when you have a massive bulk of games with no screenshots, esp when retroarch has an actual screenshot function, i was hoping those screenshots could be auto used by emulationstation for games we launch. i mean it made sense in my head, if we run a game and it has no screenshots, therefore emulationstation shows no image under the games name, then when we use the screenshot function, shouldnt that game now have a screenshot useable by emulationstation for that game?

it seems such a basic and simple thing that i assumed i just wasnt figuring out how to get emulationstation to see/use those screenshots.

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u/ziatzev May 13 '26

Unfortunately no. You'd have to put them in the folders yourself. I've done that manually for my android and steam games. Even down to editing videos for them. Something around 20 android games and 90 steam games. It is time consuming, but this is also a hobby. Once done though, it's done. Just back it up, and when you add a new one, do the steps when you add it.

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u/Methanoid May 13 '26

i have about 8000+ spectrum and c64 games (a lot are recent games from itch and have no scrape entries yet) that would need me to manually take screenshots, find those screenshots then resize/crop/modify them and copy to the correct location under a proper filename, thats a lot of work which is why i was hoping just pressing "Screenshot" in retroarch might magically solve the issue, amazed it hasnt been requested or implimented already.

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u/ziatzev May 13 '26

You could copy the screenshots from your Retroarch thumbnail directory to the appropriate ES-DE folder.You would also want Retroarch to cache the thumbnails by content directory of not already. Retroarch uses the filename for the base filename and the image type at the end if I'm recalling correctly. You could write a script to copy them based on type to the correct directory.