Artist images: size and scale and cropping is unpredictable

I know this has been discussed before, but I haven’t seen a workaround. This is not just awkward, seems like a bug.

Images of artists that look good in the artist browser have strange effects on the artist page. Sometimes very small, sometimes very large and cropped.
In this artist browser, look at Aaron Parks, and at 3Quietmen, Stefano Battaglia (2nd and 4th) – both pictures look good here.


But on the artist page, the picture of Battaglia is very small even though the image size is 700x570 pixels:

On the artist page for Aaron Parks we have the opposite problem: the image is scaled to the screen width and cropped so it is meaningless (I don’t know the image size, it comes from Roon):

And yet another case: Al Kooper (2nd in the third row in the browser view) is cropped so that only half his face shows, but on the artist page the full image is shown (although again pretty small, again I don’t know the original size).

The smaller display for Stefano Battaglia is intended behavior. We don’t scale images to the big size unless there are enough pixels to do it without significant artifacts and they are much wider than they are tall. The small size display mode is the fallback path for artwork that can’t be turned into a background gracefully.

The Aaron Parks issue is what we call “The Foreheads problem”.

This is a difficult data problem. We have images of all different sizes and aspect ratios and the interesting parts of the image vary quite a bit from one to the next. We have heuristics based on aspect ratio and size, but they tend to work better for pictures of groups than pictures of individuals because the center of interest in a picture of a person is not always in the same place.

When it works well, it works well:

Last time we thought about fixing it, we decided to build a little button that lets you drag the image into the right position, or maybe tap the center of interest. We’d capture that data and re-distribute it to everyone so that each one only needs to be fixed once.

@brian2, fyi in case I got any of this wrong.

1 Like

I guess I just have to start playing more AC/DC.

I have one picture 1400x786 which was turned into full-width.
Another one 1655x1177 is not, shown very small.
The second one has more pixels – is the problem that it is too high, so you would have to crop it and don’t know how?

@brian, what’s the “perfect” picture size to get artist pictures displaying in full screen mode?

1 Like

Not sure of the exact numbers, @brian2?

An image must be at least 960px wide and have a aspect ratio greater than 1.55 to be given the full banner image treatment.

Hopefully soon we can give you guys the ability to position the image correctly and this will stop being an issue.

I’m running v1.2 on my Windows 10 desktop. Several of my artist icons are black (no picture from Roon).

I’d like to post pictures, and when I do they do not span the full terminal width (remain as small pictures).

What are the minimum resolution and scale necessary to provide the full width display (same as the Roon-provided Artist pictures)?

Is the extension important (.jpg vs .png)?

Thanks!

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/artist-images-size-and-scale-and-cropping-is-unpredictable/10018/7?u=rugby

Hello, in fact it’s the image ratio that counts. I have set up backgroud images with 540 or 550 px wide but with aspect ration above 1.6 and it works. 1.6 aspect ratio let you have the whole height of the image and won’t crop.
So for now, i use images with 1230x550 px and i have good background images. Still trying to improve that resolution mais it’s noit a real issue because computers and tablets can easily handle 1 or 2 Mb images without latency pbs.
I read above that Roon Labs capture the users data and re-distribute it to everyone so that each artist only needs to be fixed once by somebody to be recognize by all librairies. If it works, it’s a real cool feature but regarding the shape of my library, i’m not sure this is active. Can someone confirm ?

1 Like

The inability to resize or scale images to fill the banner is really disappointing. I hope more work goes into this. Millions of Facebook users adjust photos to fill their banner, so certainly it’s not an insurmountable technical issue.

@brian2
Has this value been adjusted to 2.55 in the meantime?
Both on my tablet and on my PC the aspect ratio of the full view surface for Artists’ pictures has more or less exactly this ratio of 2.55 to 1.
I just tried and uploaded a picture of Anacreon with an aspect ratio of 1.55 and his head lost its beard and pedestal.
Original:


The way it looks on the Artist page:

After I changed the aspect ratio to 2.55 (by extending the dark parts to the left and the right) and uploaded the picture again, it looks just right:

Try 2.285 (it is a number related to the golden ratio, as per this document)

Easiest way to test it is to change the artist picture with this: (just copy the url and choose “Paste URL from clipboard” under the “Edit” > “Change image” field):

https://i.pickadummy.com/2285x1000?border=1&bordercolor=00ff00&g=5

This will load a dummy picture (of grayscale 5) of 2285x1000 pixels, resulting in a 2.285 aspect ratio, with a 1 pixel border of green (if you see all 4 margins green, it means that it fits just right)