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Alhadis
Madder Max

Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2008 8:35 am
Posts: 4014
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Tue Apr 16, 2013 5:37 am 
 

Lately I've been seeing an increase in people adding multiple versions of a release's artwork into one ugly, low-res collage in the album art slot.

Let me reiterate why this is a bad thing:

  1. Bad quality:
    As we all know, the maximum filesize permitted for album artwork is 50 KBs. That doesn't allow for a great deal of quality, so users are forced to scale down artwork and compress the shit out of them before they'll fit in a release's art slot.
     
  2. Can't be taken apart:
    The site may one day allow multiple versions/reissues of an album to be added, allowing different versions of artwork to be displayed per release. Obviously having the artwork glued together in an ugly composite isn't going to make things any easier.
     
  3. Bad for embedding:
    Many users (including myself) use Metal Archives as a source for artwork to embed in their mp3 files (to display on portable devices like iPhones, iPods, whatever). The images supplied by MA are generally lightweight on filesize, so users know the images on MA won't inflate the size of their music collection drastically (as you would if you used images from, say, Discogs)

The solution?

Leave the original release's artwork in the album slot.
Upload the rerelease artwork to an image-hosting service like ImageShack or Imgur.com, and link to them in the additional notes. What I've done here is a good example.

When describing the re-release, simply link the relevant words ("alternate artwork", "reworked cover art", etc) to the externally hosted artwork. If you're unfamiliar with HTML, follow these instructions:

Spoiler: show
Copy the following code, and replace the yellow parts with the URL of the image and the text you want to turn into a link:

          <a href="URL" target="_blank">DISPLAYED TEXT</a>

Make sure to link to the image directly, rather than a page displaying the image (hint: the URL should end in ".jpg", ".jpeg", ".png", etc).

For example, to link to this image, you'd use this code:

          <a href="http://i.imgur.com/iTP26Te.jpg" target="_blank">Click me, I'm full of colour an' shit.</a>

This approach will make things easier for when/if the site ever supports multiple reissues (or at least multiple images per release). This method also allows you to link to images with extremely high quality, since they're hosted externally. :)
 
 
NOTE:
For splits that have two different covers for each side, it's okay (and recommended) to leave the image as a collage.

But for the love of GOD, please stack them vertically, NOT horizontally. You can see here for example how much better it looks than if it were stacked horizontally.

*drops the microphone*

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Erosion of Humanity
Destroyer of the Gods

Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 5:12 pm
Posts: 5898
Location: over yon hill
PostPosted: Tue Apr 16, 2013 4:16 pm 
 

This may seem like a dumb question but up until now I never knew that you could use the album art from M-A and put it on your ipod or what have you. So how do you do that?
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OzzyApu
Metal freak

Joined: Fri Oct 13, 2006 12:11 am
Posts: 10821
Location: Seattle
PostPosted: Tue Apr 16, 2013 5:19 pm 
 

Right click, "save image as" to desktop, then move it to whatever... Just like most images on the internet.

@Alhadis. I'm one to put two arts together and stack up side by side / top to bottom (example: the In Flames Jester Race page is my doing). I'll make sure not to do it anymore and undo what I've changed up to this point.
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Erosion of Humanity
Destroyer of the Gods

Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 5:12 pm
Posts: 5898
Location: over yon hill
PostPosted: Tue Apr 16, 2013 5:56 pm 
 

Thanks Ozzy, I honestly didn't know how to move images either until now. I stopped understanding computers and the internet years ago.
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Man is truly a wretched thing, and the forest is committed to expunging him from existence.

Azmodes wrote:
It combines two of my favourite things: penis innuendo and derigin.

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Alhadis
Madder Max

Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2008 8:35 am
Posts: 4014
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Wed Apr 17, 2013 2:12 am 
 

OzzyApu wrote:
I'll make sure not to do it anymore and undo what I've changed up to this point.

Excellent, thanks mate. :D

Erosion Of Humanity wrote:
This may seem like a dumb question but up until now I never knew that you could use the album art from M-A and put it on your ipod or what have you. So how do you do that?

Do you know how to embed the artwork into mp3s via iTunes? :) If not, just highlight the selected song in the playlist, right click, go "Get Info..." and that'll bring up a window where you can edit the properties/tags of the selected song(s). If you've selected only one song, there should be a tab at the end that says "Artwork". Then click "Add" and pick an image that's been saved to your computer.

If you've selected multiple tracks, simply double-click the blank box that's labelled "Artwork" instead.

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Dembo
Dumbo

Joined: Fri Apr 21, 2006 9:58 am
Posts: 2182
PostPosted: Tue May 14, 2013 9:11 am 
 

Don't images from upload sites disappear from those sites after a while?

And aren't there some way to make an image file take less space without loosing in quality?

Anyway, I'll change those collages I remember doing, and do the upload site thing for those I'd planned to do collages for.

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Alhadis
Madder Max

Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2008 8:35 am
Posts: 4014
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Tue May 14, 2013 9:18 am 
 

Quote:
Don't images from upload sites disappear from those sites after a while?

Nope. Well, not in the cases of the ones I mentioned anyway (to my knowledge). TinyPic, for example, seems timeless... This emote -> Image was one of the first images I uploaded using the site, which was on January 31st 2005, nearly a decade ago. ;)

In either case, it doesn't hurt to keep an archive of the images you host on image-hosting services, in case they one day crash or whatever... :D

Quote:
And aren't there some way to make an image file take less space without loosing in quality?

To give you the simplified answer: no. PNG is the only lossless image format intended for online use. I could write a book explaining the pros and cons of which format to choose, but eh.

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Porman
Sweek Souvlaki Muncher

Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2005 5:00 pm
Posts: 1703
Location: Sweden
PostPosted: Tue Jun 18, 2013 4:42 pm 
 

The real issue would be, to keep a png file under 50k and have the image at 600 * 600 px.

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Alhadis
Madder Max

Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2008 8:35 am
Posts: 4014
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Tue Jun 18, 2013 9:52 pm 
 

Entirely depends on the content of the image, dude. If an image only has a limited colour palette (common with black-and-white logos) you'll be amazed what saving an image as PNG-8 will do for you. ;)

I've managed to squeeze 5000x2000 sized images beneath the 50 KBs mark and I'm not even joking. :lol:

PNG-8 differs from PNG-24 (the lossless, high-quality version that most people think of when they think of PNG images) in that PNG-8 files use an indexed colour range... very similar to GIF files, except with a slightly reduced filesize. (Although this isn't always true for every image... some images, particularly greyscale ones, will be smaller in size as GIFs than PNG-8. *shrug*)

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Porman
Sweek Souvlaki Muncher

Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2005 5:00 pm
Posts: 1703
Location: Sweden
PostPosted: Wed Jun 19, 2013 8:15 am 
 

Yeah, well, I wasn't talking about those :P
I'm talking about the very detailed images, you know, those you get smushed out and blurry when you compress them.

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Alhadis
Madder Max

Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2008 8:35 am
Posts: 4014
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Wed Jun 19, 2013 8:23 am 
 

Yeah well, gotta sacrifice quality against size... :\ In the case of very detailed images, JPEG would be your best bet. You'd be looking at either shrinking the image's dimensions to retain higher quality, or raping the everloving crap out of the pixel quality whilst maintaining wider dimensions.

Yeah, you can't win. :lol:

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Dembo
Dumbo

Joined: Fri Apr 21, 2006 9:58 am
Posts: 2182
PostPosted: Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:31 pm 
 

Some where it's unclear to me, for different reasons found in the additional notes, which the original cover art is or which new cover comes with what re-release:

http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Ex ... Steel/7252
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Di ... tions/2066
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Me ... ood%21/659
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Pa ... Driven/231
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Me ... rphia/5130
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Br ... Birth/1137
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Vo ... imits/2049
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Kat/666/12986
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Ul ... shes/20031
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Ac ... _Mind/6916

Some where the original seems alright or clear but where there seems to be other versions with unclear belonging:

http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/A_ ... oder/97307
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Ga ... umi~/35993
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Fo ... rtion/1384
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/In ... Cult/15296

Some where I can present pictures of several versions while it's unclear to me which release some of them belong to:

http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Kr ... aos/213162
http://i.imgur.com/g1DvzL2.jpg - original
http://i.imgur.com/RpitAMK.jpg - LP?
http://i.imgur.com/8RXgdNV.jpg - slipcase?
http://i.imgur.com/Cplp0Mg.jpg - Ultra Riot version

http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Fa ... 6cken/1726
http://i.imgur.com/SGuiOod.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/HdBXHpC.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/D7IabV7.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/o0v0zoi.jpg

The last one have some stuff written about it on the band's official site, which don't make everything clear and which sort of go against the additional notes. http://www.fateswarning.com/Discography ... /NightOnBröcken.aspx

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