Check for availability of release-group cover art

MusicBrainz Development
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TL;DR Is there a way to check for release-group cover art without triggering a 404?

For a release you check if it has cover art with the MusicBrainz API:

https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/70b969e8-2d56-4b27-937a-0f20b3bfe987?fmt=json

This will give you a JSON object which includes a "cover-art-archive" property:

"cover-art-archive": {
    "darkened": false,
    "back": false,
    "front": true,
    "count": 1,
    "artwork": true
},

That makes it trivially easy to check if a certain release has cover art. In my application I check it like so:

testReleaseArtwork(mbid) {
    return fetch(`${this.#APIs.MusicBrainz}release/${mbid}?fmt=json`)
        .then((response) => response.json())
        .then((data) => {
            return data["cover-art-archive"].front
        })
}

This function is called from another function. That function loops through the first ten search results until it finds a release with a cover. This works but the results are a bit wonky at times as not all scans of artwork are of the same quality. I thought therefore that it would be better to first check for release-group art work.

When you try the query mentioned above for a release-group the result is a bit different.

https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release-group/b290e941-2908-4ef2-9815-63f084f041a6?fmt=json

The result for that query doesn’t include a "cover-art-archive" property. At which point I think you have to default back to querying the CoverArtArchive API:

https://coverartarchive.org/release/026c90a2-b9ef-498b-b0a6-cb790eb556d8/

Which is fine when there’s art work to be found. But if there’s no art work it will throw a 404. Which is what I’d like to avoid. The reason being it looks amaturistic in the DevTools but maybe that’s not a good reason. Another reason is that to me it’s not an actual error, it’s an indication of a lack of information. It tells me I should go and loop through the releases.

Here’s a release group without cover art as an example.

Is there any way to check for release-group cover art without triggering a 404?

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