Thanks for all your replies. For reference I’m working with Hail to the Thief
*** Also realised I had a misconception of RG artwork. It’s not a separate upload. It’s artwork mirrored from an existing chosen release. ***
Here’s all the available cover art (fronts) for that release group:
Cover art for my Aussie release is highlighted red. It’s not great - 350x350px. Release group is yellow. That’s better - 2840x2834, but a little dark. The one highlighted green is the best IMHO - smaller at 1400x1400, but great colours and sharp. But it’s on a totally different release to mine, and there’s no way Picard would have ever found it.
To @jesus2099 's point, I’d argue all the artworks in those top three rows are the same, and correct for all those releases. It’s only the quality that differs, due to scanning technique, what “good enough” meant for whoever uploaded it, etc.
So, if we are happy to replace poor quality versions on releases with better quality, what’s the best way to do that? Do I upload 11 more copies of the same image (creating 11 more unique entries in the CAA)? Or can we move to a principle of least redundancy and have one copy of the file that several releases refer to?
Which brings me back to the idea of using RG artwork kind of like Amazon art. Make it it’s own entity, and if there isn’t anything specific defined for a release, present the RG artwork transparently through the MB backend instead. That way it doesn’t matter which order cover art preferences are set in the client (thanks for the tip @aerozol). The server will figure it out and the client will get something useful.
Or alternatively enable “Release Group CAA” by default. Is there a reason it’s not?
Either approach would allow for the guilt free cleanup of poor quality artwork, because if the RG artwork is better quality you can remove the crumby release artwork and the client side would still get something useful. The better RG artwork would still get suggested because there is no poor release artwork “blocking” it.
As to @aerozol and @IvanDobsky 's points about whether the RG artwork should be the original release or the best known, that’s probably going to remain a judgement call.
One of those options would be what I’m proposing. Keen to hash it out further if there’s interest.
Cheers
Jim
Some possibly related threads: