Artwork – general mode of operation

Dear community,

I have a general question about how artwork actually works on Kodi. I’m using Kodi 17 on several platforms (Win10, MacOS, Android) and my movies are stored in folders which are named just like the movie within this folder.

My understanding is that if you add a directory within the video section, if you tell Kodi that this directory contains movies and click on “Update Library”, all that happens is that Kodi will create a file which contains links to the actual artwork files on the Movie database. This works for me but I was wondering if there is a way to store the artwork locally. I am using the Artwork Downloader which indeed downloaded fanart, posters and banners. However, I have the impression that Kodi still uses its database to download artwork from the Movie database. How can I check if that really happens?

Is there any way to make sure that Kodi will not access the Movie database?

Thanks!