Is the only way to interface with this from the internet scanner "Get from internet" or manually going to the cover art folder? It seems quite odd.
Thinking about it, yes. It is a bit quirky, and might be unexpected behaviour. But what you will discover is that the cost of MC having deep functionality is that the UI can be a bit imperfect.
Rather than apply it as the series cover art, it applies cover art to every single episode overwriting images from thetvdb. Considering cover art > get from internet only applies to the actual series cover and not episodes in this scenario it strikes me as a bug or unexpected behavior based on the UI.
Yep. That is what the functionality currently does.
I guess it might make more sense if selecting the Series and pasting an image saved it at the Series Cover Art. But then there would be no way of adding Season Cover Art, other than the automatic way using "Get from internet", as there is currently no way to select a Season belonging to a series. So then we would have three ways of adding Cover Art at the Series/Season level; The "Get from internet" functionality, for Series, pasting an image with the Series level selected, and for Seasons, going to the Cover Art directories, adding and renaming appropriately the image desired.
That is how you do what you want now anyway; Go to the Cover Art directory and the \Series and \Season sub-directories, add the image files and rename them to match the "Series" name or "Series - Season #" as appropriate. You might even need to run the "Quick Find In File / Cover Art Directory" for MC to pick up the new files. I'm not sure, as "Get from internet" works for me almost always.
The functionality could certainly be improved. Maybe the best way would be to enhance the "Add from file" so that;
1. When an Episode is selected, the image file is made the Episode Cover Art.
2. When multiple Episodes are selected, a dialogue allows adding multiple files, one for each Episode.
3. When the Series level is selected, a dialogue allows files to be selected as Cover Art for the Series and each Season. If an image file isn't added for any of the Series or Seasons, MC wouldn't change any existing Cover Art image for those, but would update each where an image has been specified.
Something like that. Maybe that is a suggestion for the "Too easy" thread. I suspect it would take longer than an hour though.