Troubled install questions. No box art

So I’ve been having some problems with my modded phat ps2. I’m been messing around with it for a while trying to iron out the kinks. Main thing right now is box art. I think I have the box art in the +OPL folder where it should be but no art is displayed when I go to games list. 

I have a 1TB SSD that’s about half full. 126 games.

When using my freemcboot memory card to load open ps2 loader it’s version 1.1.0. If I take the memory card out and load it thru free hd boot it’s v1.2.0. Not sure if that’s causing issues 

With the memory card not inserted, all the OPL settings are default and I get an error when trying to save settings. With the memory card inserted, I can save settings but it saves them to the memory and I think it’s supposed to save to the hard drive. I can’t find a setting to change where it saves. 

Also, most of the tutorials for box art involve having backups of all your games in the CD/DVD folders on a usb or another place on your computer. Obviously, with like 500GB of games this is pretty impractical. I have some of my games backed up but not all. I can use OPL Manager in HDD mode to get the games list and get the artwork and I guess it saves it to the ssd. Is there a way to save the art folder to a USB drive without having to copy all my games? So, like, I have my SSD plugged in to my pc, generate the art folder, but have it save to my usb thumb drive. Seems like it should be simple but I don't see a way to do it

I feel like I'm so close to everything I want but also, I'm temped to wipe the SSD are start from scratch and format as exfat. maybe try PSBBN.

I do have two hard drives that have all the games but app versions might be different.

Wd Blue Wd10ezex 1 Tb 3.5 Internal Hard Drive

WD Blue SA510 1TB 2.5 SSD