thanks everyone yep it is identical in every way that brings me to a different question if the album art is poor quality can you scan you album art in and delete the art that is there ?
Replacing artwork is a tricky one. Here are my own personal thoughts on this based on the guidelines and scanning 500+ CDs and booklets.
I am thinking of usability. The main aim of the images are for identification purposes, secondary use is for people to download while tagging music files.
I am also thinking about the time taken by someone previously uploading their images - did they scan them? Or did they find them elsewhere online? How annoyed are they going to be when I delete their older images?
Is the artwork below 1000x1000? Is it fuzzy or unreadable? Then I will certainly replace it.
Are images missing of rear cover, medium, booklet? Then Iāll add to the artwork. Most importantly the rear cover and CD images as the most different appear here.
If I see artwork with no real credit as to source - Iāll replace it with scans.
In this situation there is a good clear sharp usable 2000x2000 front cover. So Iād leave that. But I would replace the rear cover as it is a little fuzzy - but the OCD would come online and triple check it really is like for like identical.
But we are all different with different needs. Iām a guy who likes his artwork in the 2-4MB range of size and find your 20-50MB PNG files unusable. So I would always try and think of others and make sure there is at least a fully usable JPG of the front at a high but not silly res. (i.e. that 2000x2000 example is ideal)
the resone i go for .png it is lossless where .jpg is lossy tho i scan it in as .tif first because i normally need to do more to it then what my scaner software can do this is what i scan it in as before i convert it to png
this is what i scan them in at
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I know what PNG is. 
I just have other uses for the artwork and need to convert those files for personal use. Largest screen in my house is only 50" 1080p so I donāt need 8K images. I also happy with 80% JPG as I prefer the savings on hard disk space as I am not planning to print these out as posters.
I tend to store the whole booklet alongside the album on the hard disk as I use a media centreā¦
I can convert as needed. So this is why I am saying this is a personal opinion.
I find it really comical when I drop my Tori Amos collection into Picard. Only nine albums, but the poor PC then locks up and groans for around 10 minutes as that is an artist where much of the uploaded artwork are also HUGE PNG files. And as I download ALL art everytime in Picard - that is a LOT of data. Even my poor 200Mbps broadband line struggles 
So I just walk off and leave it to catch upā¦
MB is an archive so it makes sense in uploading higher quality art. Iām not saying donāt do it. We just all have different uses for it. Quality and Accuracy should be king here. Just is nice to see a usable JPG up front when a huge PNG set is in place.
It is especially good to see high quality art of some of your rarer and more unusual disks and their booklets. They are more worthwhile to archive than yet another edition of some commercial release or a big well known artist.
Comically it was the size of your images that meant I had to stop helping you with the checking of some of your uploads. My old PC was struggling to download those pages. JPG images are snappy to load, but a 50MB PNG crawls down the screen like the good old days of 300bps acoustic couplers 
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thanks for letting me know that my pngs are hard on your computer ill take photos of the albums and stick them it google drive then you can check them with images that are not so hard on your computer
Uncompressed images sure are better for processing, but as a delivery format I much prefer jpg as well. Weāre working with scans of printed images here. Quality of finest details isnāt that critical. Noone will care if the raster dots are not quite as perfect looking as they could.
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ok so i should start uploading jpg instead of png?
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Reasonably sized jpegs, I think, yes.
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ill leave the pngs that are there for now someone eles can always download them and reuploaded them as jpg if they are in a rush
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You can also mark them as āRawā.
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@st3v3p Please do not change for me. And I would not use Google Drive anyway. That would take even longer. When checking data I like a smooth workflow.
Upload of PNG and JPG is both acceptable. It is a personal choice. We are after preservable quality.
Personally I stick to 600dpi and save JPGs at 80%. This gives me an image at 2850x2850 \ 2MB type area. Sometimes that compression drops right down to a few KB on more simple covers! I am a fussy old git so would not want to see any compression artefacts on my TV screen.
Sometimes kick up to 1200dpi on a matrix if I need the little details, but then I am cropping that before saving.
I also put in many submissions to Discogs and they have a 4MB file limit. Sometimes a double page of a booklet may go over that, but splitting things into single pages means I am always under that 4MB limit.
I was just giving feedback on my own experience on a stupidly fast broadband line it just makes me laugh when I see images like that making everything go so slow again like I am back in the 1980s 
.
I also have different uses for the images. I have a media centre setup and am expanding the artwork attached to the albums. As there are 20-30 thousand albums in there I am keeping my personal storage needs down by working with JPGs instead of PNGs
(@rdswift Marking them as raw would be incorrect as @st3v3p edits the images. Raw is for those images that have been left uncropped. )
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we probably went a little off topic but thanks for the input guys.
When a conversation goes āoff topicā it can be split to another thread. No need to start a new thread. (Iāll go work out how to split thisā¦ I thought we could just use the āpost admin optionsā but canāt find it now. Someone will soon chop post eight onwards into a new threadā¦ I get used to it TBH even when on topic as I waffle too much)
You will find this conversation has happened many times on the forum if you use the search. Do what fits your workflow best. If that is 50MB PNG images then than that is good for future users.
The key is to make sure they are of a high enough quality for the needs.
Comically I have just scanned and uploaded a new release that is basically black and whiteā¦ so the JPG compression has gone into overkill and the WHOLE release is under 10MB for all the images. And they are still over 4K resolution.
Please keep uploading your high quality images.
There are other people who upload utter carp artwork. There was a guy the other day uploading 300x300 images that were impossible to read, and below guideline quality. For some bizarre reason they were being accepted. Now THAT is an area that IMHO was wrong, but the community seemed to think it was fine. Now THAT was weird.
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General note: if you want high-resolution JPEGs but upload higher-resolution non-JPEGs, you can download the 1200px āthumbnailā generated by IA. It should be available for all new/recent uploads and some(/most?) older ones too. There is a userscript that exposes this on the MusicBrainz interface until CAA-88 is resolved:
It should be easy to add this as an additional option in Picard for yourself as well, but it probably wonāt be upstreamed in Picard until CAA-88 is resolved either.
(I also upload (probably too) huge PNGs to CAA, which are slow to load on my connection when I need to look at them again for getting credits off of them for enteringā¦ So I wrote this userscript so I could see a high enough resolution image that I can read the small print of most booklets without waiting a month for each piece of āoriginalā CA to be loadedā¦)
Low, 300Ć resolution artwork that is still accurate is better than not having any at all. Yes, high resolution scans are preferable, but 300Ā²px ones will do until someone adds something better.
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Would be good to get something on the GUI to display images larger than 500 pixels. Choices of 250 and 500 donāt let much detail get displayed when trying to work through track lists and credits. Especially if flicking back and forth between pages in the booklet.
As to the guy with the 300 pixel images. That was weird. I couldnāt understand why someone would intentionally reduce image quality before uploading. They didnāt want to talk, so I left it to other people. Just seems so funny that on one side we have stunning high quality images that make Picard groan and then we have this guy.
Personally I am happy to leave Picard to slowly grind away. It is a good signal to me that I am getting the top end artwork. This is an archive for the future so we need big fat quality artwork.
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That is what the linked userscript does. Feel free to also go and vote on CAA-88 and maybe @bitmap can back to it slightly sooner. 
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I did understand that. 
This website is a funny old destination. Very much a āRoll Your Own Siteā with all these scripts. I see it like one of those Quest games where you need to find the secret switches.
I am concerned that deletion of images without being certain that the replacement images are of exactly the same coverart might be misunderstood as an approved action.
Unless the Editor has that certainty then the safe course is to add the new images with good edit notes and move them to the most appropriate place in the image queue. While leaving the old images on CAA.
An example of Releases with slightly different coverart (which was not at all obvious to me for some time) can be see at
From memory, the destructive replacement of fuzzy images with clear ones that are actually from a separate Release nearly occured in this example.
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Not sure what you are pointing at there @mmirG ? Vinyl and CD editions often do have different cropping of the images. And later pressings get tweaked. Seems fairly normal. Your example there Iād want to see how the physical disks differ - especially the matrix info. May well find the pressing plant has changed and one of those releases shouldnāt have the 1989 date.
Even more noticeable when you look at Discogs image of the LP as the top of the peak is still visible
And the Discogs CD image has over cropped the top even more that the copies at MB. Though I expect that is the fault of the uploader.
You should try digging through some of the really common stuff that gets multiple releases world wide over decades. 
Crikey some of the little differences there are hard to spot! Especially when printing presses change hands, labels get taken overā¦
What I would prefer to see is the disabling of images instead of destruction. Like Discogs do. That then allows some checking back in history. Not everyone has the eyes to spot the small details. I know I have often stopped people uploading random cover artwork just because they are tagging.
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@mmirG and here we go down another tangentā¦
There is certainly something wrong with the way those are currently linked. Do you have scans from your CD available? Notice how @molluscās CD has text written on it. And the Discogs CD has a photo image.
What does your disc show? Can that scan be uploaded? What about your rear cover - many more differences in rear covers and CD images than just on the covers.
One of the discogs links should be removed as the Discogs CD has an image.
Somewhere here we have reissues. So there are doubts about all the dates therefore.
Also note the Discogs one has a barcode. No barcode on the mollusc version.
I think you have give a good example why we need scans of all parts of a release
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