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[Alex B]

As I said in the other thread, I would like to suggest adding artist images to the feature set.

As we know, MC does not have "artists" separately in the library. It has only files and file tags. I don't know if that is ever going to change, but for now, the info about artist images has to be in a file tag.  (It would be great to be able to maintain separate relational artist files with artist specific tags & linked artist images and show this data in visualizations and view schemes, but maybe that can be handled more easily by accessing wikipedia and other online sources.)


I think the following additions would do the trick:

1. A new library field: "Artist Image". This would be similar to the Image File field.

2. A new file location option: the location of the artist images. This should be a single separate folder and the naming templete should be simply [Artist].jpg

3. An internal system for creating and maintaining the artist thumbnails.

3. A new view scheme option: Use Artist Image as a thumbnail when the view is set to show artists in the thumbnail mode.

4. Two new details view columns: Artist Image (large thumbnail) and Artist Image (small thumbnail)

5. Action Window and right-click options for handling Artist Images (add from file*, drag and drop*, remove, quick find, paste from clipboard, etc)

6. An online database for the images.

7. A lookup and submission tool for Artist Images. This would work exactly like the Cover Art tool works now. You could select the best image for each artist and the system would vote the images automatically.

8. TRACKINFO_INSERT_ARTIST_IMAGE   (maybe also other developer options -- does MC currectly offer other track image related commands?)


When an Artist has several linked images MC should be able to display fanned thumbnails in the usual way.

When an artist image is not available MC should automatically show standard cover art for that artist.

* The manual linking options would be essential for linking a single "album artist" image with a multiple artists album and for linking different images to different files from the same artist (eg. the artist in the 60's, 70's, 80's & 90's   or   in studio / live concert / etc)

[Jaguu]

I support this as well. It would be handy for my fine art gallery as well. I would click on an artist face and a slide show of all his paintings would start right away.

So it should be not only available for audio, but also for images and video (could skim through all the main actors of a movie!!!)

[JimH]

I think it's a nice idea.  Thanks, Alex... and jaguu.

[Matt]

As we know, MC does not have "artists" separately in the library. It has only files and file tags.

We've thought about the idea of allowing a field to be marked as "store this per-artist" or "store this per-album".

I suppose "Artist Image" could be one of these stored per-artist type fields.

[darichman]

Hi guys, please don't get angry for me bringing this up, but isn't a relational database setup the best way to do this? Once you have the foundations for it set up, it wouldn't be hard to add the same image functionality to other fields: [Movie/Show] and [People] stand out in particular to me. It would also give people the ability to specify thumbs for particular [Genre]s, providing a truly visual way of navigating the library. I think it was Glynor who mentioned that changing the database in this way would slow down MC a fair bit... is this the case? Or is there another reason why this wouldn't be a good idea?

We've thought about the idea of allowing a field to be marked as "store this per-artist" or "store this per-album".

I suppose "Artist Image" could be one of these stored per-artist type fields.

Short of a full relational database (which I understand is a huge undertaking) this would be wonderful. It would really make navigating music a lot more intuitive and would be a pretty big 'wow' factor for new users.

In regard to images:
Would you plan on having an image lookup functionality or require the user to locate the image and store it themselves?
Where would the image be stored? "In folder" mightn't make sense, because relevant files will naturally span multiple folders...

In regard to fields:
Would you allow inheritance here? If I fill out the tags for an artist, then get more music from the same artist, the fields would be automatically applied?

This is my first "I think I'm getting really excited about MC13" moment

[hit_ny]

We've thought about the idea of allowing a field to be marked as "store this per-artist" or "store this per-album".

I suppose "Artist Image" could be one of these stored per-artist type fields.

I still think this is limiting possibilities.

..if you want to manage any media or files that have no concept of Artist or Album.

Let me repeat what i said in the other thread

MC needs a new feature to associate image(s) per [Field]

Want artist pictures, associate them with [Artist]
..cover art with [Album]
..label logos with [Recording Label]

..and so on.

If you will, it's using images to define generic groupings other than just Album.

Surely there must be openings here with Images to name just one type of media.

[JimH]

MC needs a new feature to associate image(s) per [Field]

While this is an interesting idea, I don't think it would have a very broad appeal.

[skeeterfood]

While this is an interesting idea, I don't think it would have a very broad appeal.

I don't know about that...

For example, being able to associate images with [Series] and [Season] would finally bring MC up to par with a lot of other front-ends for browsing TV shows in Theater View.

My Vudu has a beautiful GUI and they create "Collections" of films, say classic Horror, Post-apocalyptic, etc with nice pictures to browse them by.  You can also browse movies by actors/directors with pictures for most of them.  Heck if you guys could re-create the Vudu interface in Theater View but extend it to Audio and Pictures I'd be in heaven.  And they only use scroll up, scroll down, select, and back to navigate the whole interface.

-John

[Alex B]

As I said, artist images would be a good start. Maybe other systems could be added latter.

For now, it would be essential to share opinions strictly about artist images, I think.

Here are some arguments:

- For the most part, they would work with a modified copy of the existing code. For instance, Gateley would not neeed to spend much time with creating the online database. It would be simpler than the cover art database because only the artist name would be needed for identifying the pictures.

- Everyone can easily find artist images from internet and I am sure that after a little while the online database would provide great success rate and several pictures of most of the artists.

- The system would allow linking alternative artist images with certain files if preferred. Naturally only one image per each artist name could work with the automatic naming system, but nothing would prevent from manually linking "artist 2.jpg" or "artist 3.jpg" instead of "artist.jpg". Maybe the lookup tool could optionally allow saving additional images with a sequence number.

- Once a named artist image is stored the quick find tool would easily link it with new files from the same artist. Actually, this could happen automatically - similarly like MC can automatically find existing cover art.

- In addition to displaying the artists pictures in view schemes the system would make possible to use artist images in track info visualizations.

- It would be a good addition to the feature list. iTunes, WMP, Winamp, etc don't offer anything similar (...yet).

[Alex B]

I just realized that in theory there would be a copyright issue with storing pictures that may be copyrighted on the online server. However, that would not be legally any different from the situation of cover art. Cover art is protected by copyright laws as well.

The pictures would be for private use and if they were donwloaded from public internet sites they were publicly available for private use. The online service would be a kind of image cache.

The online lookup tool would not need to be advertised as a "file sharing tool". It could be described as a browser that can optionally download a browsed picture. Perhaps it would be better to advertise only the local functionality that makes possible to use artist images and not specifically mention the online service.

[John Gateley]

How do we manage multiple images? With cover art and other meta-data, there is one (or maybe a few) correct answer. But with artist images, there are many "correct" answers.  At 700,000+ artists, that could be quite a bit of data, both in terms of storage and bandwidth.

j

[Alex B]

I was thinking about storing only a few images of each artist, say 5 to 10 at max.

Could you configure the voting system to delete the less popular images automatically? It could keep new images only a certain amount of time and delete them if they do not gather any votes and more popular images already exists.

Let's say, for instance, that at least 5 voted images of a named artist would be needed to start the automatic deletion process. It would then delete all less popular images that are older than a certain set age. It would always keep at least the 5 most popular images and possibly a bunch of newly added images.

In this way you could avoid storing hundreds of Beatles/Madonna/etc images, but the system would allow new images to be voted for some time.

Later on you could tighten the rules if you start experiencing bandwidth and capacity problems.

In addition, you could resize and recompress overly large images automatically. The images would be intended for thumbnail and track info visualization purposes only. A maximum size like 600x600/200KB or even smaller should be fine for that.


Edit: fixed a couple of typos and edited a bit...

[Alex B]

Have you recently visited the last.fm site ?

They use artist images extensively and the images are uploaded by users.

for example: http://www.last.fm/music/The+Rolling+Stones/+images

(you need to be logged in before you can upload)


Edit

I attached a screenshot of last.fm's upload form. They try to avoid copyright isues by requesting the users to upload only images that are "public domain".

[glynor]

We've thought about the idea of allowing a field to be marked as "store this per-artist" or "store this per-album".

I suppose "Artist Image" could be one of these stored per-artist type fields.

This would be ideal!  I'd use this for things other than images of artists.  I'm particularly thinking of data on whole Series or Seasons of TV Shows (like a rip of the IMDB Plot Summary for an entire show).  It could also be great for "tapes" of Live Shows.  I have tons and tons of Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and other live shows that have "show notes" from the people who did the encodes.  As it is, I add these to the notes field for the whole "album".  But that makes keeping it in sync when you make changes a little more challenging (not impossible of course, but it'd be easier if I didn't have to remember to find and select every file in the Album).  And plus, it'd be nice to still have that Notes field for other purposes sometimes.  Artist Bios would also be an ideal candidate for this treatment.  You wouldn't have to remember to manually paste in the bios to the field for every new track you add to your database... Just set the Artist and the Bios would "Automagically" show up.

This would be a great little feature add!

As far as the original idea of the Artist Pictures, I'd love to see this too.  I'm personally not too picky on if it forces you to only store one picture per artist or whatever (if it allows multiple pictures, that's fine, but I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water).  You could just have new changes overwrite the old ones (perhaps with a warning dialog or something).  If there is some way to manage multiple "versions", great, but I don't think it is a deal breaker for the idea.  It'd also be nice to have Genre Pictures too (for Tiles mode) and pictures associated with many of the other Fields in the database.

[leezer3]

This would be ideal!  I'd use this for things other than images of artists.  I'm particularly thinking of data on whole Series or Seasons of TV Shows (like a rip of the IMDB Plot Summary for an entire show).  It could also be great for "tapes" of Live Shows.  I have tons and tons of Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and other live shows that have "show notes" from the people who did the encodes.  As it is, I add these to the notes field for the whole "album".  But that makes keeping it in sync when you make changes a little more challenging (not impossible of course, but it'd be easier if I didn't have to remember to find and select every file in the Album).  And plus, it'd be nice to still have that Notes field for other purposes sometimes.  Artist Bios would also be an ideal candidate for this treatment.  You wouldn't have to remember to manually paste in the bios to the field for every new track you add to your database... Just set the Artist and the Bios would "Automagically" show up.

This would be a great little feature add!

As far as the original idea of the Artist Pictures, I'd love to see this too.  I'm personally not too picky on if it forces you to only store one picture per artist or whatever (if it allows multiple pictures, that's fine, but I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water).  You could just have new changes overwrite the old ones (perhaps with a warning dialog or something).  If there is some way to manage multiple "versions", great, but I don't think it is a deal breaker for the idea.  It'd also be nice to have Genre Pictures too (for Tiles mode) and pictures associated with many of the other Fields in the database.

Wholly support this
I'll say once again too, we need multiple images per file, artist pictures are a very good and more mainstream use to this.
Uploading artist pictures is potentially trouble though, although any issues with this would be similar to those with album covers (Having said that there are 2, max 3 or so covers per album, but multiple artist pictures, but plenty of variations on each of these)

The ability to store fields on a per album basis is a nice one, but I don't know how well it would work in practice? Say I choose to store a field for a single album, but want to use this for multiple albums- If I then update this on one album, but not others, it may cause some confusion?
Other thoughts on this welcome

-Leezer-

[hit_ny]

The ability to store fields on a per album basis is a nice one, but I don't know how well it would work in practice? Say I choose to store a field for a single album, but want to use this for multiple albums- If I then update this on one album, but not others, it may cause some confusion?
Other thoughts on this welcome

I think what might work instead, is custom fields that support image(s)

That way you would select the files to apply the image and it can be done for all.

The other advantage is it does not disturb the existing [Image File] field.

View schemes would need an option to extend the default behaviour that is currently cover art only.

The result would be the same as requested earlier along with the added bonus that said image fields could also be used as visible markers in the files list of a view scheme. Think of the small icons that show cover art in the file list but configurable.

[Alex B]

A monthly bump.

I just stumbled on this while searching the forum. I had almost forgotten the idea. I still think it would make an excellent new feature. The "artist picture" feature could be initially introduced even without the internal online database support. It would be rather easy to use the wiki or google feature for finding suitable artist pictures and download them manually.

[jgreen]

Here's a quarter-month bump.  I too think this would be a great idea, exactly as Alex proposed.  I think the risk here is opening it up to too many "good " ideas whose complexity ends up making the original idea impractical. 

AFAICT, the mad scientists are always interested in "marqee value" features and I think this is one of them. 

[Berto]

2. A new file location option: the location of the artist images. This should be a single separate folder and the naming templete should be simply [Artist].jpg

I'd rather see 'folder.jpg' for artist images, because I have an artist image named 'folder.jpg' in every artist rootfolder. Under every artist root folder I have album folders containing the album tracks and an album image.
Or at least let me choose where the artist image is en how it is called.