Brian, I do not rebuild. MC does something. I just backup and restore the db. After that MC shows red icons instead of the thumbnails.
"Red icons". Do you mean a red circle with a line through it? That icon means "file not found". It does not mean anything about the thumbnail. That is MC's "missing file" indication. This is fairly normal if your drives are not online and MC is trying to touch the file for the first time. Or it means that your file paths are incorrect. Your file paths should be the same if you are using the same machine with the same drive mappings.
If you see a Blue music note icon instead of an album cover, then that means that there is no thumbnail built. MC should rebuild those, dynamically, almost immediately after you see them (a few seconds).
I do want thumnails to be built dynamically. This causes sleeping drives to be wake up, as soon the selected view contains a thumbnail not yet built.
Oh I see, this is all about waking up your drives again. Well I'm not sure what to say. New libraries need their thumbnails rebuilt, so it's going to access the cover art to do that. If your cover art was on a single drive, maybe that would not happen? Maybe? I'm not 100% sure, but I *am* sure that you can put all of your cover art in a single folder instead of having it in every folder with the music files.
I'm pretty sure MC behaved different in earlier version. Please try, it take less than a minute.
Since you asked, I gave it a try. I see no thumbnails when I switch to a brand new library and restore a backup. I see blue music notes. They then build thumbnails rather quickly. However... when I switched back to my normal everyday library (Main) it had blue music notes too! I checked Help > System Info > Processing . I see that almost none of my thumbnails are built. That's very surprising. I'm not sure if they showed all built before I did this experiment or not. If they *were* built before and switching libraries erased them, that would be strange.
Brian.