Artwork & Performance

Nokkvi uses a server-only artwork pipeline — images are fetched directly from Navidrome on demand and kept in an in-memory GPU texture cache. There is no local disk cache.

How Artwork Works

When an album comes into view, Nokkvi fetches the image directly from your Navidrome server and decodes it into a GPU texture handle. Up to 512 album images are kept in memory at once (LRU eviction), so browsing a section of your library you visited recently has zero network overhead.

Thumbnails in list views are populated around the visible viewport — items well outside the visible area aren’t pre-loaded.

The Artwork Panel

The large artwork panel shown alongside most library views (Albums, Songs, Queue, Artists, Genres, Playlists) auto-hides when the window narrows enough that the main list would get cramped. Resize wider — or taller on portrait-shaped windows — and it reappears.

Artwork Quality

The artwork_resolution setting controls the size requested for large panel artwork (the full-size view when an album is focused):

Option	Requested Size
default	1000 px
high	1500 px
ultra	2000 px
original	Full resolution

Thumbnails in list views always use a smaller size regardless of this setting.

Navidrome Server Settings

Because Nokkvi no longer maintains its own disk cache, your Navidrome server does the heavy lifting of serving and resizing artwork. Two settings in navidrome.toml are worth tuning:

ImageCacheSize

The default 100MB cache is too small for large libraries and will cause the server to re-process images on every fetch. Set it to at least 1500MB:

ImageCacheSize = "1500MB"

CoverArtQuality

Navidrome encodes artwork at quality 75 by default. The format depends on your setup: standalone binaries use JPEG, while Docker builds use WebP (native libwebp is bundled). Either way the quality value applies to both formats, and 75 is visibly lossy at the large panel sizes Nokkvi requests (up to 2000px):

CoverArtQuality = 90

If you want to explicitly control the format, Navidrome exposes EnableWebPEncoding. On non-Docker installs it defaults to false (JPEG/PNG); set it to true to opt in to WebP:

EnableWebPEncoding = true

Updating Artwork

If you update a cover in Navidrome and want Nokkvi to reflect the change, right-click the artwork panel in the Albums, Songs, or Queue view and select Refresh Artwork. This evicts the cached image and fetches the latest version from the server.