But then the tagger has to know how to find the square cover so instead of patching the tagger that way we would rather patch the tagger so that it knows to square crop images itself, optionaly.
That is easy to solve. Like the books editions I mentioned above. Look how Picard displays it. If the display box is 1000x1000 then shrink the longest side to 1000 and then āfillā the background.
Look at how they display mobile phone footage on TV news that has been shot with cameras held in portrait mode. A decent media player should be able to deal with covers in a similar way.
Iād jump sideways with a question - how many of these non-square images are in your collection? Isnāt it just simpler to keep an edited set of images?
Personnally, I do try to have as many as nonāsquare editions I can in my collection. 
With Picard, if thereās a cropped image available, I can just drag and drop that onto the release and save it. Itās not ideal, since if I reload the release I have to remember to do it again, but itās workable for the releases I care about.
If you mean I keep my cropped images locally and drag and drop from there instead of MB, that is an option, and if the consensus is to ban cropped images, thatās what Iād do.
Iād prefer to keep them in MB, because (a) thatās where all the other metadata and 95% of cover art is coming from, and (b) there are clearly other MB users who like having square cropped images.
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It is quite clear that we could use some kind of extra type for ānot exactly the originalā in such cases and in cases where for example the CD releaseās cover art has minor detail difference but worse quality and/or even lack of cover art.
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Why, oh why, did they ever come up with non-square packaging? All was so easy when all we had was LPs and singles ā¦ 
Just stumbled over this thread because LOTS of my cover art had been deleted by some auto-editor, leaving some albums without any cover art altogether. 
Itās sometimes impossible to find a correct one online if you got no scanner or itās broken.
Personally, I like use 500x500 square images in my tagged files (but keep the scans in an āArtworkā folder), but I can probably live with letterboxed versions (like Picard currently delivers). What I canāt live with is having no cover at all.
Maybe we should really go for an extra image type like āSquare frontā and let the user select in Picard whether to pull this one or the original? Then again, many softwares start relying on the image type being āFrontā for displaying a cover (a file might contain more than one image), hmm ā¦
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Iām curious.
Was the coverart from the correct Release?
As in was it the front or rear art as found on the exact Release you have.
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If that is an absolute requirementā¦ Iām pretty sure that a fair amount of artwork already present does not comply. Exact release? Down to how much detail? Even Catalog Number. Iāve got things from over the years that have different looking covers with the same release number.
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Ah, I understand.
And am relieved that is what has been happening.
Yes, each Release is actually defined by an exact specific coverart.
The slighest change and it is a different Release.
All those Releases get gathered into a Release Group.
A representative coverart image is chosen for each Release Group - you might find that image more useful to you.
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I think you can tell Picard to take release group cover art and set release group cover to the one that is square (an LP or a digital edition, for instance).
Actually maybe what we could change slightly MBS code so that the default RG cover art would be the earliest official square cover art (I would also add where, if any, release country equals artist country).
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