One of the best hidden features of Media Browser is the ability to add images for just about anything you have metadata for. Certainly you’ve noticed when browsing through your movie collection there is an actors tab for each movie. However, once you click this tab you’re greeted with a number of actor’s name with question mark icons by them. Luckily there’s a way to change all that.

The first thing you are going to need is images of all those actors you want to see mug shots of. I know what you’re thinking, there must be thousands upon thousands of images you need to get. Don’t worry, someone else has done a lot of leg work for you already.

The ImagesByName Google Code Project (update: moved to thehtpc.net) has already done a great job of starting a downloadable archive of not only actor images but movie studios and genres as well. To get started all you need to do is download the files, for example “R11_ImagesByName_Peoples.part1.exe” and “R11_ImagesByName_Peoples.part2.rar”, from the Google Code site then extract them to your hard drive.

Once they’re extracted you will need to copy all those actors’ folders into a main folder for Media Browser to access. The normal location for this directory is “\ProgramData\MediaBrowser\ImagesByName\”. Make sure that your folders are in the root of this directory, not in an actors subfolder, or Media Browser will not find them correctly. Once you’ve got your ImagesByName folder you will need to set the directory in the Media Browser config.

Currently, the Media Browser configuration program doesn’t include support for setting the ImagesByName directory so you will need to open the xml config file in notepad. To find the config use notepad to open “\ProgramData\MediaBrowser\MediaBrowserXml.config”. You should see a tag labeled “<ImageByNameLocation />”. Remove the slash from the tag and after the tag type the location of your ImagesByName folder. Afterwards enter the closing tag, “</ImageByNameLocation>” and save the file.

If you’ve done everything correctly that should be all there is to it. Restart Media Center and enter Media Browser to check that the new actor images are being displayed.  If not double-check that your “ImageNameByLocation” value is correct and be sure that each actors’ directory is under that folder, not inside any other subfolders such as “actors”.

For more Media Browser tricks check out how to get TV Series Metadata with MediaScout and Encoding Information inside Media Browser.