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 “Raw”.
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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 “off topic” it can be split to another thread. No need to start a new thread. (I’ll go work out how to split this… I thought we could just use the “post admin options” but can’t find it now. Someone will soon chop post eight onwards into a new thread… 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 white… 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 “thumbnail” 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 won’t 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 entering… 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 “original” CA to be loaded…)
Low, 300× resolution artwork that is still accurate is better than not having any at all. Yes, high resolution scans are preferable, but 300²px 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 don’t 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 couldn’t understand why someone would intentionally reduce image quality before uploading. They didn’t 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 “Roll Your Own Site” 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 I’d 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 shouldn’t 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 over…
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 tangent…
There is certainly something wrong with the way those are currently linked. Do you have scans from your CD available? Notice how @mollusc’s 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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The covers in the musicbrainz database sure look like exact same image, just cropped differently. There’s nothing wider or narrower about the mountain tops. One is simply cut off lower.
I don’t think it needs to point to different pressings. It could be tolerances in manufacturing. Or the users cropped the images differently. Or it was cropped off because it was placed at the edge of the scannable area on the scan bed…
When cropping off the outermost edges of scans, I often have to crop off a lot, as the paper rarely is cropped perfectly in parallel with the print. Maybe it would be more accurate to pull the paper straight instead of the print, but I guess most users will much prefer to look at straightened artwork.
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i scan it in as strait as i can with out over cropping then i put it in affinity photo and delete any extra that way that extra bit matches the back ground of the player or what ever your looking at it in that makes it less noticeable
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I agree it could be either. The difference is fractional and most likely a user cropping issue. Impossible to tell without seeing the originals.
But it is funnier as you dig deeper in this example. It is very likely to be a manufacturing issue.
Look at the original vinyl at Discogs - zoomed out far enough to see the top of the mountain and blue sky above it.
Then the Mollusc scans here have a CD with text on it and the cover image has taken a bit of the mountain top off.
Then the CD at Discogs trims the top off even more (or “wider”) and has a photo on the CD.
Assuming that the images are perfect and not over trimmed by the uploaders then this could show the progression of the re-issues over the years. Each time it has been re-manufactured the image has been cropped at production.
I’ve certainly seen that occur more than once.
Impossible to know without closer inspection of the CDs. One example I’d be looking for are the SID codes that appear from the mid-1990s onwards. That will help identify which is the reissued disc here.
Currently it could be argued that both should probably have their dates removed as they are “unknown” as to which is the one released in 1989.
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If the vinyl cover was perfectly square, some cropping of the artwork is expected for the CD version, as these are usually slightly wider.
Even if we had covers of the two different versions at hand we would not be able to tell whether different cropping would affect all covers equally or if it’s due to tolerances.
Also, as we can’t see the edges of the actual cover, we can only speculate how much has been cropped off by the user or scanner. Most people place booklets on the edge of the scan bed to get it straight.
Making a good judgement here is tricky as we will have to make many assumptions.
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The real differences here will be on the CDs and the REAR covers. Clear differences are already available between the rears visible… so I’ll be curious as to what @mmirG has on his disc and cover. Barcode on rear? Photo on disc?
That will be far more visible than the cropping on the front.
Editors removing icoverart need to be aware of the importance of minute differences between coverart that can create the basis for different Releases.
And be aware that those small differences are far more important to an encyclopedia that having high resolution scans that paper-over differences.
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Totally agree with you. If you keep reading the thread you’ll see we are all about the little differences. It is why the rear cover is usually more important than the front cover.
This is one thing that annoys me too. Seeing people over editing images before upload. Yeah, take off scratches and damage but there is a point when over processing an image goes too far.
The images are supposed to show exactly what the Release looks like. There are plenty of other websites out there for tarted up covers for tagging needs like https://www.theaudiodb.com/.
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This image was from in hand Release. Care was taken not to change/crop the mountain top.
The apparent mountain peak is wider.
The difference between this image and the other MB frontcover cannot just be a matter of cropping by submitters as the other image is has a narrower apparent mountain top. The other submitter cannot have started off with my coverart and then un-cropped it.
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