Scrape From

This option is to allow you to change the source of where your images are coming from. It allows you to choose from Arcade Database, theGameDB or Screenscraper.

Screenscraper offers more options for game scraping (for example several image options, you can scrape video previews, etc.). But there is also a limitation in the number of assets you can download each day: 50,000 requests max per day. Also, if you use a “mix” for the image, be aware that you need to download a screenshot + box + game title/marquee, which are 3 downloads for 1 composite image.

In order to use ScreenScraper, you need to create a login on their website (otherwise you'll get a message in French telling that you need to register an account there).

Configuration is through Main Menu > Scrape:

• Scrape From Choose your database source. Remaining options will appear/disappear based on this. Read Scrape From for more info.
• Image Source
• Box Source Prefer 2D boxart or an automatically generated 3D render of the boxart. This will apply to both the boxart thumbnail image and the “Mix” image outputs.
• Logo Source Choose whether to use the marquee (with its own background) or the wheel (with a transparent background) for the logo.
• Scrape Ratings This option will scrape the user ratings of each game and will be displayed with the artwork you downloaded. This can be helpful when wanting to try new games you have never played before.
• Scrape Videos Downloads a short, low-resolution video to play when the game is selected. This option takes up a lot of bandwidth and will dramatically increase your scraping time for large collections! Weaker SBCs may also struggle with this.
• Scrape Fanart Downloads a HD fanart of the game to display in the background/screensaver. Depends on how the theme has implemented it.
• Scrape Manual Batocera 5.27+ offers you the ability to show game manuals (by hitting [Select] on a game) if you scraped the manuals.
• Scrape Pad2key settings For Batocera v29+, you can automatically download a pad2key profile to use the joypad to emulate a keyboard.
• Username if you use screenscraper as a source, and you have an account with multiple threads, using your screenscraper username and password here will leverage scraping with as many parallel threads as you have access to. It's a lot faster.
• Password
• Scrape Now Begin scraping. Your system may become unresponsive for a moment, but scraping will begin in the background. When done, be sure to Update Games Lists to see your boxart!

No, scraping is part of the EmulationStation binary, and can be only started from there.

You can edit /userdata/system/configs/emulationstation/es_settings.cfg and edit the section:

    <string name="ScreenScraperUser" value="your_login" />
    <string name="ScreenScraperPass" value="your_pass" />

Make sure EmulationStation is stopped before editing this file, otherwise, ES might reverse your modifications. If you're not sure how to stop EmulationStation before editing this, you probably should use the UI to enter your credentials

If your username/password contains any special characters (like ?, Ó, ±, or №) it won't be parsed correctly by ES and you'll fail to login. Should have chosen a simpler password.

Just kidding. You must escape special characters with a preceding backslash (\), eg. specialcharacter?inmypassword would become specialcharacter\?inmypassword. If the \ itself is in your password, just use \\.