[WARNING: Old out of date 2018 post. Skip to bottom] Keeping or dropping Amazon as a CAA fallback on MusicBrainz.org

Thanks for listening. I certainly agree it is wrong to expand a depreciated artwork system to other parts of MB. But maintaining the limited art where it is sounds good.

Please consider adding text to the CoverArt page pushing people to upload replacements for Amazon artwork. I have seen some releases with insanely high resolution scans of the rear and booklet, but no fronts.

People need nudging to replace the Amazon art as most people don’t read these forums they won’t know that it is in danger of being removed.

You have nudged me to handle art different now… if I see an automatically linked bit of art coming from Amazon now I’ll just go grab that art and dump it on CAA instead. Personally I don’t really like doing this as I don’t have the “CD in hand” to always confirm, but it is in the aim of not loosing what we have now. :slight_smile:

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Perhaps this could form the basis of one of the “community cleanup” initiatives? Check and upload to CAA if appropriate. I do believe that the goal should be to do away with the linked cover art from Amazon.

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In echoing what everyone is saying, I am very for just letting this trend naturally develop so that the amazon % keeps decreasing until it becomes negligible and eventually the “turning it of” will seem logical to everyone since it’s (practically) not in use.

That being said, I also don’t see anything wrong with “depreciating” it and f.ex not fixing any trivial bugs (huge-database-breaking ones are a different story obviously) by closing bug-tickets with “amazon is generally depreciated, we encourage uploading to the CAA as a fix”

I also agree with jesus2099’ and IvanDobsky’s suggestions: make it obvious these are amazon and maybe incorrect, encourage people to upload to the caa instead. (this is also relevant to our re-designer, chaavi!)

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I don’t know why, but much of the time, the CAA images do not load on the website. At least you can see the Amazon images :smirk:

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Other than for the first few minutes (where the IA is processing (e.g., making thumbnail versions) the uploaded images), this shouldn’t be the case. Consider opening a ticket or a new forum topic so what’s going on can be debugged/sorted out.

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I did - some time ago - The Cover Art Archive is currently experiencing difficulties. No-one replied.

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Could we at least make it more obvious that a cover art is provided from amazon and therefore can’t be trusted? Like a red border around the cover, a :warning: warning symbol besides the “Cover art from Amazon” text + adding “(may not be accurate for this release)” or hiding the cover behind a translucent white haze which disappears if you click on it?

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At last Amazon cover art support is going to be dropped

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5% of artwork is a big hit, so it is a pity there is no announcement being made beyond a note in some meeting minutes. My views have changed since the start of this thread as i know how dodgy that art quality can be. though this thread had triggered me back then to go on a chase of artwork for many of my subscribed artists that were heavily reliant on Amazon art.

it would be good to get an announcement on the front page as a nudge to get a bit of a push to grab some more art before the images are turned off. or at least change the tiny “cover art from amazon” title to a louder bigger warning prompt

Edit: Lights Go Out = Images Turned Off. Guess it didn’t translate well. Sorry for more confusions.

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Right now there is <5% artwork from Amazon being displayed due to a change in Amazon’s API. The decision was not so much made to remove the support because we no longer want it, but rather to remove the code instead of trying to jump through hoops to change it to adhere to Amazon’s new API.

The decision was made 3 days ago, at the weekly meeting (which everyone is welcome to join and chime in at) – of which I try to have the notes posted here on the forums within 24 hours. The decision having been made does not mean it gets implemented right away (in fact, this seems like a fairly low priority thing). The posting of the meeting notes is not an announcement in and of itself.

Again, the change hasn’t been made/implemented yet. At the very least it will also be announced in the MusicBrainz server update notes once the change has actually been made. I don’t know if it really warrants its own separate blog post, but maybe we will do that too. We’ll see. :man_shrugging: Besides, as you may know, changes to MBS code does very rarely happen overnight. There’s a good chance the broken Amazon code will remain for a while as the MBS devs focus on working on other areas of the code. MBS-11848 may also get made and sit for some time before the faulty Amazon cover art code is finally dropped.

We won’t be removing Amazon links from the sidebar, let alone entirely. You can still go to the Amazon page from the release page and get artwork. Nothing’s changing there for the foreseeable future.


Just for fun/reference, the stats of CAA cover art vs. Amazon cover art coverage for the last ~2 years. :slight_smile:

Screenshot 2021-08-05 at 08-43-15 Database Statistics - Timeline Graph - MusicBrainz

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I was not trying to be negative. The 5% figure came from your meeting notes which are always interesting to see. And it is clear in there that this is an Amazon change and no point in wasting MB time on keeping up with them as they will keep changing. I was trying to suggest it can be spun to a positive and use it as a nudge to people to grab artwork for their favourite artists.

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I just want to additionally note that this change has no impact on the working or not working of Picard’s Amazon cover art plugin. That’s purely depending on a release having a link to Amazon, and on Amazon’s URL structure not changing.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Does the Amazon coverart plugin still work?

Here is your announcement I guess?

MBS-12200: Drop schema objects related to Amazon cover art support . For a long while, releases with Amazon URLs would be checked for cover art on Amazon, and if found, a link to the image would be cached for display. Unfortunately Amazon’s API to do this changed, and we haven’t synced artwork from them in years. We still have many old images cached and we still display those, but they aren’t guaranteed to be in sync. Last year we decided to drop support for displaying these, while giving time for users to upload any correct images to the Cover Art Archive. To help with this, we have a report of releases with Amazon cover art but no Cover Art Archive front cover.

I don’t know what’s up with the amazon cover art stats but it doesn’t look right.

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Thanks @chaban. I had actually spotted this blog item and was already using that Report to update some arts.

I had thought about necro’ing this old post too :ghost:. I will distance myself from the above thread as I agree that Amazon can go bye byes and wont be missed…

[Edited to add: @chaban’s title addition to get people to skip this FOUR YEAR OLD thread needs to stay as I really don’t think like this now and know how unreliable Amazon is. The only thing worth reading now is “bye bye amazon, hello report”]

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As have I. I just slogged through 3 pages of that report (its total length is 1450 pages as of this writing) and am wondering if we should have a Community Cleanup initiative to help take care of it before the new schema change rolls out. It may seem silly (since usually that cover art can be found elsewhere) but I’ve found a few examples where the cached images had been replaced with watermarked versions or the script couldn’t pick up any images at all.

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@HibiscusKazeneko I was using the report to spot where art will be “lost” on artists in my collection, but was filling in with Discogs artwork instead. Often I have notice Amazon poaching from Discogs anyway.

That Watermarking had started to appear a lot on things like Audiobooks. At least when watermarked it is clear that it is less trustable.

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YMMV. In cases where only tiny (i.e. postage stamp-sized) images are available, Discogs would indeed be a good option. Another case that comes to mind is digital releases that are no longer available; if there’s no Discogs link present, the only option is the cached Amazon image.

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Oh I do agree it is a mix and match of choices. Sometimes Amazon has a nice big image that can be used and I try and check for that if it is there. Still compare it to Discogs as too often I have found CDs linked to Digital editions, or a UK CD release connected to a USA ASIN of an LP.

Depends how old the release is really. Second hand stuff is especially ropey. Anything older than 10years I treat as suspect.

It is why I didn’t really like seeing this thread appear as that idiot Ivan earlier in the thread waffling away has learnt so much more about quality artwork and how shops are often hopeless with accuracy. :joy:

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From what I can tell with my releases in there, I don’t see this as a loss.
The covers are not always correct.
So uploading them as is would be no good.

Having those Amazon images now is nice for illustrative purpose but I never considered them as being the actual release front covers.

I mean we could as well fall-back display the release group cover for the releases without cover art, it would give the same results: Nice for illustration but this is (may) not be the front cover. :slight_smile:

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