Having licensed a lot of content from companies including Getty in my time running companies serving user bases probably 100 times bigger than Roon’s, I believe Roon could absorb the cost. Even so, I would happily pay a small incremental to have this.
Roon always stated that a big part of the sub fee was for licensing of Metadata - yes the do pay Rov / Allmusic something, but not Musicbrainz etc. So there should be a bit of a budget for a Getty deal 
The missing pictures have become more obvious through 1.8 - so really and truly if they offer to have artists pics in the credits - then there should actually be artists pics in them.
Somehow it would be great if there were sort of a community addon to Roon - where users could actually share their metadata (you have no idea how many unrecognized albums I ahve and did the tracks myself) plus artist pics. Sort of that they are not legally to blame.
Would be a great shared effort
1 Like
I agree… I wish they would go more in this direction but it does take a large commitment in tech and people to create a good process and manage it so you don’t get crap output, so you can’t go here lightly.
2 Likes
I hate the grey circles too.
I put a lot of effort in having all the information I can on my files, and in a software (which I LOVE) that promises metadata to be a key experience, I hope for more. Or at least a little flexibility to help them.
In my case I’m a metalhead and it’s hard to find decent hi res pics, or information in general of some of the bands on mainstream data providers.
I tried to edit info on AllMusic to contribute and help those who like the same music/artists.
Let’s take the AOR band Wigelius for example.
When I got to the page here’s what I saw:
Almost an empty void…so, I clicked on “Submit Corrections” and…
Only text fields, no place to add images.
All Music states that “Changes to written content like reviews and biographies, tagged metadata like Genres, Styles, Moods, Themes and Similar Artists, as well as information about credits, album covers, sound clips and music videos are provided by our data provider, TiVo. You may submit artist- and album-related corrections to the TiVo data team by following the steps on this page.”
So I think maybe they want us to write “there’s no picture of X artist” and just let them know.
So I went to Musicbrainz
Artist pages don’t have images there. In case of metadata, I found it very “unfriendly” to add a release, both the process and the UI.
Sadly, my preferred site for cataloguing my releases, Discogs it’s not supported.
Besides this, I found Roon very inconsistent when showing details on an artist page:
You can get a circled picture
Just the name of the band
Or a decent picture
I think that if you’re going to include a place for a picture of something in your design the first thing I’d ask would be “what if there’s no picture? What would we show?” and I have some humble suggestions:
Maybe re design with something like this:
-IF there are good, decent pictures, clicking on the image would open them, maybe there coud be an indication about the amount of images available as on the releases. Maybe this solves aspect ratio conflicts too.
-IF there are NO artist picture, maybe Roon could ellaborate some collage of the artist album covers available on Tidal or Qobuz. I’d prefer that instead of the grey circle with the initials. This could be done with the big picture header too, but I think it could get too repetitive.
Of course you should keep the option for people to upload their own preferred pictures, but at least you get the grey circles out of the way
Well, sorry for the long post, I hope this is helpful
2 Likes
Couldn’t agree more! This is my biggest annoyance about 1.8 – a release that in general I like very much. If you’re going to dial up the graphical nature of a release and make it more “magazine like” then don’t do things that enable a huge number of pics frames to be empty like in credits. Although fewer and fewer people buy physical magazines anymore, I doubt many would sell if the pic frames on pages were empty…
3 Likes
Sorry, But I have the following question:
Where do I have to save the Images of Artists?
Rate Your Music will default the Artist image to the cover of their most popular album. That’s more elegant than some gray circle and doesn’t run you into copyright issues.
1 Like
From my experience, once you upload the image to the artist’s profile, you can delete it from your hard drive and it wil still show on Roon. Make sure to back up your library to keep them, otherwise if, for instance, you uninstall and then re install Roon, the images won’t be there and you’ll have to go through the whole process again.
1 Like
In Roon, you are able to permanently change an artist’s image the following way:
No other steps are needed for Roon 1.8.
However, I would definitely advise to keep a copy of the custom image (both uncropped and cropped versions), so that you can reuse them anytime in the future.
(Like I did when upgrading from 1.7 to 1.8, as Roon changed the default height of artist images in the Artist screen. Or like I had to do occasionally when Roon unexpectedly removed custom image from an artist, due to reason unknown.)
1 Like
I think that Roon team advised in the past to stay around 1920x1080 (1.777) ratio but my experience with Roon 1.7 lead me to 1920x800 (2.4) ratio in the end. I continue using that ratio with Roon 1.8 just fine.
For fast and effective cropping, croppola.com is a fantastic website.
For testing of my custom images, I always triple check using laptop, tablet and smartphone (all 3 in landscape full screen mode).
1 Like
This comes up periodically. Roon guidance is to post on https://fanart.tv/.
Doing this at scale is just harder than it looks. Fanart.tv provides the infrastructure, processes and copyright handling management needed to manage an initiative like this. Just like Musicbranz for example with metadata, any artwork successfully posted there will eventually find its way to roon’s servers. There may be scope to create a roon user group there dedicated to art optimised for roon design elements.
However, they are very strict in terms of provenance to avoid copyright issues and QA so that any art can be multipurposed on any device on any app, not just roon. You are not necessarily going to have to be a photoshop expert or have access to advanced graphic editing tools to contribute, but its not far off. I tried with a few contributions a few years back but gave up when quickly overwhelmed by the workload of the QA process I wasn’t expecting.
There may be a critical mass of contributors now so it is an idea that might be worth revisiting.
In 1.7 you wanted to be very close to 1920 x 1024 or 1920 x 800. It had to be high res enough and the right aspect ratio or it wouldn’t display in the large expanded format you see above – you’d only see a small image. You can be above this resolution if the aspect ratio is very close to the same. I was never sure of what the exact criteria actually was for it to be displayed in large format, but if you stuck to these guidelines you were generally good (and you’d know it you were not as you’d immediately see if the image you uploaded was not displayed in large format). I do not know if 1.8 changed any of this. To me it seems less rigid than 1.7 was but I’m not sure. Hopefully someone in the know can enlighten us…
1 Like
I don’t have the time to track down custom images, but agree wholeheartedly with this thread. It is not just missing images, but there should be a diversity of images especially for more popular, longer-careered artists. There should be 10, 20, 50 images for Miles Davis, not 1!! Roon would be much more dynamic with a lot more artist images.
2 Likes
Well, I have started to sort my artists and merging artists, if tags were incomplete etc. Plus adding artist pictures with a vengence 
Amazing how much time one can spend grooming Roon. Atleast a good lockdown hobby - just a shame that the result will only be artists being complete on my Roon.
I do hope we can come up with an idea to optimize this.
I loved the full size image of Whitesnake, also I recall seeing a reference to TiVo in some other threads, perhaps that’s the source we need to send updates to. it would be nice if Roon added a method to officially “Submit Images” or “Submit Updates”. Some method for us to not have to setup accounts and just get information we are all interested in improve our metadata.
1 Like
I went through this a few months ago. I replaced every small Artist image and missing Artist images in my whole library. I also suggested doing the member database but did not really get any responses on it. I would contribute. I say just start a thread and let’s see what happens? It only took me a couple days of messing around to go from 75% Artist images to 100% Artist images. Definitely not going to bother with pictures for everyone in the credits… I don’t get that choice to be honest. I am sure they are aware that it would mostly be gray circles