I was 12 minutes too late to vote no on a bunch of edits that are adding duplicate cover arts 20 times bigger in mega bytes than the existing (500 k → 9 M).
As far as I know, if we remove them from MB, they will still always remain in CAA.
I really think it’s a waste of our planet Earth resources to provide bogus storage and cooling it down, etc.
Are those eventually removed when not linked to MB after x months?
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9 megabytes doesn’t sound so big to me. Scanning CD cover in 600 dpi resolution easily produces files bigger than that.
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In this case the 9 M image looks the same as the 500 k it duplicates with same resolution.
The 9M is a PNG and the 500 k is a JPG with no artefacts hindering its legibility.
Why would we waste storage with duplicate image that is looking the same and takes 20 times the space?
I mean waste for the Planet and its resources.
Anyway my question is how do we remove images from CAA? because long time ago, when we unlinked (remove) images from MB, they would stay on CAA.
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TOTALLY with you on this one. I use Picard and have it set to “download all artwork”. If it trips over a huge hoard of artwork like that it sits there and chokes for ages while it attempts to download it all. A task that is frustrating if Picard had picked the wrong release as I need to wait for it all to download before swapping to the “correct” release.
There seems to be a slightly confusing “anything goes” rule to CAA.
Was there anything in the edit notes to say why the PNG files were uploaded? Were they fresh scans? Or has someone just converted the JPGs?
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Even if the jpeg looks good, if we have access to an uncompressed or losslessly compressed scan we should prefer that over a lossy format like jpeg. Higher resolution scans are great too. We automatically produce down-converted versions - it’d be a good Picard feature to have a setting to prefer those, so I don’t think that’s a good reason to not use better scans when available.
I also don’t think IA is very concerned about the storage space.
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I think it is irresponsible to make Earth support twenty times more heavy data with no useful gain.
Why doing that exactly?
There are limits, things should not go nuts this way, limitless with no purpose.
I very much understand both arguments and personally I only see one solution: Let’s start a fundraiser to run CAA and all other storage we need with 100% renewable energy (excluding nuclear).
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Deciding not to consume energy for futile things is even better.
Who needs 10+ MB for a scanned CD surface — the “mirror” side — or a plain colour tray paper?
I would more happily support or participate to an organisation who informs about the waste of such things rather than support it.
IMO the environmental aspect of this thread is unnecessary. The amount of data in CAA is so small that it has almost no environmental impact. If we say that the average size of a piece of cover art in CAA is 3MB, then CAA’s current 1 700 000 image files would count up to less than 5TB. Even if we double that size, it would still fit into one big hard drive.
At the current size of CAA, I don’t think Archive.org cares about the unlinked data if it doesn’t cause problems. Sounds like IvanDobsky’s “download all artwork”problem would be something they’d want to look at though. Keeping the unlinked data also has a small benefit: sometimes it’s easier to correct mistakes when we can see what the old cover art was. However, the benefit is so small that I wouldn’t mind if they removed all unlinked images every now and then.
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There needs to be better choice and labelling. I often prefer higher quality artwork. Much of my music is played back on a 50" TV screen. Part of the trouble I see is CAA grown without categories.
When using MB on the Cover Art page a small thumbnail is loaded up - but the interface doesn’t give a huge hint as to what quality or size artwork is really lurking.
Picard could do with STOP button for when loading (especially if I know it is the wrong boxset). It also needs a more granular way of choosing the artwork to be download and used.
Every one of us is fussy and has different needs for that artwork. There is no one answer to fit everyone. So having choice is good - which includes the choice of the higher quality versions too.
But the original description referred to PNG versions that had zero visual different to the much smaller JPG versions. To me this is daft (and I have seen people save a JPG as a PNG and think they have put the quality back in! Like those ID-10T users who convert MP3 to FLAC! ARGH!!)
Choice is needed.
(I should also note that I am NOT voting on some Green Enviomental thing here. Personally I have plenty of extra point in the Green Bank due to not having kids 
Let us please not get distracted into some green environmental argument here…)
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