[BUG] Parsing breaks steam screenshot manager

[tobiasriper]

Parsing and saving games to steam with SRM breaks the screenshot manager as of Aug 2025 so previews no longer work in the screenshot and recording window and new screenshots don't show up in this window either (even non SRM, steam games). You have to delete the screenshots.vdf file to let the screenshot manager rebuild.

[kevinfiol]

Seems to still happen on SRM version 2.5.30. I'm running Linux Kernel 6.16 on Fedora 42.

[vaner-org]

This has been a problem for over a year. SRM is unable to manage game IDs between parses and adds duplicate entries to screenshots.vdf.

[DEDantiSocial]

Is there any way to fix this issue?

[vaner-org]

If this is affecting you, you have to navigate to to Steam > userdata > [your user] > 760 > screenshots.vdf. Open this in a text editor, go to the end of the file, under "shortcutnames", look for duplicate entries, delete those, and search the list above for any references to those entries, and delete those blocks too.

Alternatively, you can just delete screenshots.vdf and have steam manually rebuild it, though that breaks other things like Steam knowing which screenshots have already been uploaded, and so should be linked with their cloud variant. But running SRM is equivalent to corrupting screenshots.vdf anyway, so you may as well.

[DEDantiSocial]

If this is affecting you, you have to navigate to to Steam > userdata > [your user] > 760 > screenshots.vdf. Open this in a text editor, go to the end of the file, under "shortcutnames", look for duplicate entries, delete those, and search the list above for any references to those entries, and delete those blocks too.

Alternatively, you can just delete screenshots.vdf and have steam manually rebuild it, though that breaks other things like Steam knowing which screenshots have already been uploaded, and so should be linked with their cloud variant. But running SRM is equivalent to corrupting screenshots.vdf anyway, so you may as well.

Hello. Thank you for the reply. I was able to fix it by deleting the file mentioned in the other post.

[tobiasriper]

I wish we could just get a real solution. Parsing is now a pain be cause then I have to delete the .vdf file and wait for the long rebuild process and then steam doesn't know whats uploaded. And the other solution seems really tedious. I don't get why no one is paying attention to this from the dev side because its really annoying.

[espiox]

Would it be possible to create some kind of script to automatically remove duplicates from screenshots.vdf without having to do the full rebuild?

[Aepoh]

It is embarrassing that this is still happening.

[vaner-org]

Would it be possible to create some kind of script to automatically remove duplicates from screenshots.vdf without having to do the full rebuild?

That effort could be better directed at fixing this entirely, it is open source after all. And, taking a look now, the problem seems to have worsened since I last checked. It isn't just duplicate entries anymore, the entire file seems scrambled.

In the meantime, you could make a backup of screenshots.vdf before doing a parse, and then replace the new file with the backup.

To simplify this process, make a git repository out of your 760 folder, and after running SRM, just discard changes made to screenshots.vdf and screenshots.backup, and restart Steam. This seems to work for me, I've managed to successfully add a new game and keep older games' screenshots intact, no rebuild needed.

I'm not sure what the purpose of SRM messing with the screenshots database is to begin with, since steam seems to self-manage screenshots against game IDs just fine.

[vaner-org]

Also, I've figured out a way to relink uploaded screenshots with their local equivalents so there aren't duplicates after the rebuild.

First, get the screenshot's file ID via it's uploaded link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=XXXXXXXXXX
Then, find the local screenshot's entry in screenshots.vdf, and at the end, replace the following fields, and add "publishedfileid" with the X's replaced with the correct ID for each file.

"Permissions"		"8"
"hscreenshot"		"11751511215788145870"
"publishedfileid"		"XXXXXXXXXX"

Once your library is fixed, I'd really recommend using git to undo any changes SRM makes to your file.

[tobiasriper]

Devs can you please look at this issue ? I don't get why more people aren't discussing this.

[espiox]

Agreed, I'm very hesitant to even use SRM until this issue is resolved, now that I finally repaired my Steam media gallery.