fetchart

Find and download game art, movie and TV posters, album covers, paintings, Pokémon, Minecraft skins, anime, book covers, app icons, trading cards, amiibo, podcast covers, artist photos and NASA space pictures from the command line. No API keys or accounts are needed.

For games, it covers about 190,000 titles on every platform: front and back covers, special edition covers (Deluxe, Collector's, Game of the Year...), 3D boxes, discs and cartridges, screenshots, old magazine ads, key art (with or without the logo), see-through logos, console dashboard tiles, achievement and trophy icons for Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and retro consoles, and game info (description, release date, developer, rating).

It also works on whole libraries: art and a gamelist.xml for every ROM in a folder, RetroArch thumbnails, posters for a Plex or Jellyfin movie folder, covers for a music folder, Steam library art for your non-Steam games, a report of what's still missing, a watch mode that gets art for new games as they arrive, and a "box wall" poster of a whole collection. And it can set any of it as your wallpaper, or give you a new one every day (or every hour).

Just type fetchart in PowerShell, Command Prompt or any terminal, and pick what you're looking for from the menu.

Type the name, then pick the right one from the matches. Each game appears once, and you pick the platform after it. Then pick the kind of art, choose from every image found (biggest first), and pick a folder. For key art, also pick its shape: landscape, portrait, a phone wallpaper, or ultrawide (21:9 or 32:9). fetchart remembers the last folder you used.

Controls: use the arrow keys or click with the mouse, and press Enter. Typing a number jumps to it. On the image and achievement lists, press S for a contact sheet: every option as one numbered picture, drawn right in the terminal in Windows Terminal, WezTerm, iTerm2 and kitty (anywhere else it opens in your picture viewer). P shows them in your browser instead. For achievements, Space (or a click) ticks as many as you want, and A ticks them all. Mouse clicks work in the Windows console; on macOS and Linux, use the keys.

A whole folder of games

Point fetchart at a folder of ROMs and it gets art for every game, saved under each ROM's own file name, as EmulationStation, RetroArch and other frontends expect:

fetchart --folder D:\ROMs\N64

• It reads No-Intro and Redump style names: Legend of Zelda, The - Ocarina of Time (USA) (Rev 1).z64 is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
• The system comes from the file extension or the folder's name (N64, snes, PS2, Sega Genesis...). You can also give it: fetchart --folder D:\ROMs\Discs ps1.
• A (Europe) ROM gets the European box when there is one.
• Games that already have art are skipped, so running it again only fills the gaps.
• If a name isn't a sure match, fetchart asks you to pick the right game at the end, or skips it with -y.

The art goes in a folder inside the ROM folder, named the way ES-DE names them: covers, backcovers, 3dboxes, physicalmedia, screenshots, fanart, marquees (logos), plus keyart, icons and flyers. -o picks another.

Game info: pick "Game info" from the menu (or -t info) and fetchart writes a gamelist.xml with every game's name, description, release date, developer, publisher, genre, players and rating, linked to the art it saved. Batocera, RetroBat, Recalbox and Pegasus read it from the ROM folder; if ES-DE is installed, its own copy in ES-DE/gamelists is updated too. Anything already in the file (play counts, favourites) is kept.

What's missing: fetchart --missing D:\ROMs\N64 lists which games have no cover, screenshot, logo or info yet, then offers to get them. It works on movie and music folders too.

Watch mode: fetchart --watch D:\ROMs\N64 keeps running and gets the art for each new game as soon as it lands in the folder.

RetroArch thumbnails

fetchart --retroarch

Every game in RetroArch's playlists gets its box art, screenshot, title screen and logo, in the thumbnail folders RetroArch shows in its menus. Thumbnails already there are never replaced. fetchart finds RetroArch in its usual places, or give it the folder: fetchart --retroarch "D:\RetroArch".

Box wall

One big 4K poster of a whole collection:

fetchart --collage D:\ROMs\N64
fetchart --collage D:\ROMs\N64 -w

It uses the pictures in the folder, or its covers folder. A ROM folder with no art yet gets its box art first. Add -w to make it your wallpaper.

Pick the shape with -r (landscape, ultrawide, superwide, phone, or portrait for printing), the background with --bg (black, white, any colour like navy or #202030, or blur for blurred cover art), and the order with --sort name, year or random. The menus ask about all three.

A folder of movies or TV shows

Point it at your Plex, Jellyfin, Emby or Kodi library and every movie and show gets a poster:

fetchart --folder D:\Movies

• A movie or show in its own folder gets poster.jpg inside it. A loose movie file gets <file name>-poster.jpg next to it.
• It reads the names people actually use: Inception (2010), The.Matrix.1999.1080p.BluRay.x264, Dune (2021) {imdb-tt1160419}.
• A folder with Season 1 folders or S01E01 files is a TV show.
• Anything that already has a poster is skipped. Anything that isn't a sure match (like Dune with no year) is asked about at the end.

In Plex, turn on Use local assets for the library so it picks the posters up.

A folder of music

fetchart --folder D:\Music

Every album folder gets a cover.jpg, which Plex, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Kodi, foobar2000 and MusicBee all pick up. The artist and album come from the files' tags (MP3 and FLAC), or else from the folder names (Artist\Album or Artist - Album (2003)). Covers come from Apple Music at up to 3000x3000, or Deezer. Albums that already have a cover are skipped.

A list of names

Put one name per line in a text file. Add a comma and a platform, or movie, album, pokemon and so on, when it isn't a game:

halo 3, x360
mw2 2009
inception, movie
the dark side of the moon, album
mewtwo, pokemon

fetchart --list wishlist.txt -t box -o D:\Art

fetchart takes the top match and the best picture for each line, and lists the ones it couldn't find at the end.

Steam art for non-Steam games

Games you add with Add a Non-Steam Game (emulators, Epic, Game Pass, old discs) show up in Steam as blank tiles. This fills them in:

fetchart --steam

Each game gets the four pictures Steam's library uses: the cover, the wide cover, the background, and the logo. Games that are also sold on Steam get the official Steam art, and everything else comes from LaunchBox. Art you already set yourself is never replaced. Restart Steam afterwards to see it.

If Steam isn't in its usual place, give its folder: fetchart --steam "D:\Steam".

Wallpaper

Add -w and fetchart sets the picture as your desktop background (Windows, macOS, and GNOME, KDE or Xfce on Linux):

fetchart halo-3 x360 -w
fetchart "the starry night" painting -w

For games it uses key art without the logo (-t logo keeps the logo) and asks which screen it's for: a normal one, an ultrawide (21:9), a super ultrawide or two monitors (32:9), or a phone, which is only saved. For paintings it uses a 4K copy instead of the giant museum scan.

A new wallpaper every day:

fetchart --daily "halo 3, celeste, elden ring"
fetchart --daily n64
fetchart --daily
fetchart --daily off

You can give it some games, a platform (its most popular games), space (NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day), or nothing (popular games from everywhere). It changes the wallpaper right away, then every morning, or the first time the computer is on that day. Add --every 1h (or 30m, 6h...) to change it more often. Windows uses Task Scheduler, macOS uses launchd, and Linux uses a systemd user timer.

To go back to the wallpaper you had before, run fetchart --undo-wallpaper, even after several -w runs or daily changes (it turns the daily wallpaper off too). fetchart keeps a copy of your old picture, so it works even if the original file is gone. A Windows slideshow or Spotlight comes back as the single picture that was showing.

Pokémon, Minecraft skins, cards, amiibo and more

Use the word in place of a platform, or pick it from the menu:

fetchart charizard pokemon
fetchart Notch minecraft
fetchart attack-on-titan anime
fetchart berserk manga
fetchart "the hobbit" book
fetchart minecraft app
fetchart instagram app -t icon
fetchart charizard pokemon-card
fetchart lightning-bolt mtg
fetchart dark-magician yugioh
fetchart link amiibo
fetchart serial podcast
fetchart daft-punk artist
fetchart pillars-of-creation space
fetchart space

Install

Windows, macOS, Linux: standalone download

Grab the file for your system from the latest release:

You can double-click it and it will show the menus. To use fetchart as a command in any terminal, rename the file to fetchart (fetchart.exe on Windows) and put it in a folder on your PATH.

On macOS and Linux, make the file runnable first:

chmod +x fetchart-macos

On macOS you may also need to right-click it and choose Open the first time, because the build isn't signed.

With Homebrew (macOS, Linux, or brew-windows)

brew install samuelarther/tap/fetchart

It builds from the PyPI package with Homebrew's Python and Pillow on macOS and Linux. On Windows, brew-windows installs the standalone build.

With Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add samuelarther https://github.com/SamuelArther/scoop-bucket
scoop install samuelarther/fetchart

With Python (3.9+)

pipx install fetchart

pip install fetchart works too.

Usage

Run fetchart with no arguments for the menus above. To skip them, put everything on one line:

fetchart <game> [platform] [options]

Game names can use dashes or quotes: halo-3 and "halo 3" both work. If you leave out the platform, every platform is searched.

Short names work too: mw2, bo2, botw, oot, gta5, ff7, csgo, ssbm, or a mix like mw2 remastered. When a name was used twice, add the year: mw2 2009 is the original Modern Warfare 2, and mw2 2022 is the remake.

Tab completion

Press Tab to complete options, art types, shapes and platforms. Set it up once:

Then open a new terminal.

Examples

fetchart super-mario-odyssey switch -t box
fetchart halo-3 x360 -t icon -q all -o "D:\Art\Halo 3"
fetchart zelda-ocarina-of-time n64 -t clean -r portrait
fetchart gears-of-war -t ach
fetchart uncharted-2 ps3 -t ach
fetchart hollow-knight pc -t clearlogo
fetchart super-mario-64 n64 -t flyer
fetchart elden-ring pc -t logo -r phone

Movies, TV, albums and paintings

Use movie, tv, album or painting in place of a platform:

fetchart inception movie
fetchart breaking-bad tv
fetchart "pink floyd dark side of the moon" album
fetchart "the starry night" painting

Some museum scans are huge (The Starry Night is 663 MB), so the menu shows the file size of big originals.

For albums, the artist plus the album name finds the right one fastest.

Platforms

pc, xbox, x360, xboxone, series, ps1, ps2, ps3, ps4, ps5, psp, vita, nes, snes, n64, gc, wii, wiiu, switch, switch2, gb, gbc, gba, ds, 3ds, genesis, sms, gg, saturn, dc, segacd, 32x, tg16, neogeo, 2600, jaguar, lynx, 3do, arcade, dos, mac, linux, android, ios.

Full names work too, e.g. "Sega Dreamcast".

Art types

Achievements and trophies, by platform:

Where the icon art comes from, by platform:

How it works

The first run downloads the public LaunchBox Games Database dump (~110 MB). It indexes the dump into a local SQLite file, and then refreshes it every 30 days. That takes about 20 seconds.

The index is stored at:

Xbox 360 title IDs are looked up through XboxUnity.

Credits and disclaimer

The art comes from the LaunchBox Games Database community, Steam, the Microsoft Store, Xbox Live, XboxUnity, Exophase, RetroAchievements, Nintendo, IMDb, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Deezer, Apple Music, MusicBrainz / the Cover Art Archive, PokéAPI, Mojang, AniList, Open Library and the App Store. Thanks to all of them for keeping it online.

All art belongs to its respective owners. fetchart is meant for personal use, such as emulator frontends, media servers, desktop wallpapers and collection catalogs. It is not affiliated with any of the sites it pulls from, or with any game, film or music company.

License

MIT