Simple, select all the albums where you’d like to leverage your own artwork, set Roon to prefer your art. For unselected albums and others you subsequently add Roon’s default should work without you having to lift a finger.
Yes, it should be a weighting of a number of objective measures (including resolution).
An easy one is aspect ratio. I normally prefer a square image over the highest possible resolution. That is, an aspect ratio of 1 is more important to me than the highest possible resolution. That would be very easy to measure. It does’t have to be exactly 1 however so this could be configurable. For example, most people would not notice that a 1080 x 1050 image is not exactly square. Most people on the other hand would notice that 1080 x 980 image is not square especially on screens where large numbers of album covers are being displayed side by side.
I am not an expert on this but I have the impression that there is also a lot of work out there from the image processing industry on image quality metrics. It is not straightforward to develop objective measures but I would have thought it was possible to adapt some of this research in image intensive apps like roon. For example:
Hi @evand. That is exactly what I do now. The problem is that it is just not working for me. I have over 8,250 albums and growing because I have a lot of old cue’s and ape’s I am gradually converting. What this means is that in practical terms I cannot do a batch select of all the albums where I want to retain the embedded art because I simply cannot remember which albums I corrected the aspect ratio for or cleaned up the color balance or contrast.
All, I can think of doing is scrolling through the album view a page at a time picking out albums that stick out because they are subjectively ‘muddy’ or do not have a ‘square’ aspect ratio, or whatever. But I soon realised it was yet another hopeless OCD task I would never finish and lost the will to live, half way through the 'D’s. I would much prefer roon to take care of this sort of thing for me, so It would be great if roon had plans to offer a smarter ‘best art’ option but I am realistic enough to realise they probably have other priorities. So, on balance I just live with it but that doesn’t stop it bugging me.
Yes, you can work around the issue. One of things that attracted me to Roon was that it took tagging and displaying seriously. There’s all sorts of detail there that I’m not in the least bit interested in, but I’m glad its there, as it shows the attention to detail that’s been taken.
I just don’t think the same level of attention has been paid to artwork.
I accept that not everyone cares as much as I do about artwork. There should be an option to use the ‘best’ artwork without users having to bother too much (what ‘best’ means is a separate discussion)
But you can save different artwork to individual tracks. So if someone goes to the trouble of finding individual artwork for different tracks, there should be an option to display it.
So as well as a ‘use best’ option there should be an option to use in order
- The embedded artwork in the track
- A folder jpg/png
- A Roon default.
Hi @Steve_Catterall, You are now in ‘feature request’ territory. You know there is a thread specifically for that? Best of luck!
Sorry, I thought this was the Feature Request section 
- and the thread is about preferring cover art from files, which is what I was asking for … so I thought it was the best place to ask ???
Oops 
. My mistake. What I probably should have said is that maybe it’s time to consolidate the thread with a proposal roon could respond to.
My proposal would be : If the user selects to get artwork using the ‘Prefer File’ option, Roon should get the artwork from
- The embedded artwork in the track
- A folder jpg/png
- A Roon default.
In that order.
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Why would one embed artwork?
Because many downloaded tracks have artwork embedded? Not to mention that many CD rippers will embed the artwork in tracks if required, and some of us do this by default…
yip, but why? What advantage does it offer over a single file called cover.jpg or folder.jpg in the album folder?
belt and braces… belt and braces… Some of us also have more than one backup as well.
that’d be me.
My quick take on it.
Advantages:
- Can be read and displayed by [most] music servers
- Integral with the audio file
- Potential to have a different image per tracks
Disadvantages:
- Increased storage space
- Needs software to imbed image
Roon uses album covers the way that you are referring to, but some music players will pull the album art from the song itself.
I have seen multiple times on this forum a request to have Roon pull from the actual file because for some users, we have multiple songs of different artist in the same folder and Roon will only pull that one file for the entire listing of songs in the folder as to where if Roon were to pull from the actual file, then different album art associated with that particular song would appear.
A lot of folks listen only to 1 or 2 songs, usually the hits from an album. Look at most users with iTunes and they have mostly singles, yet the associated art is displayed.
MD
The main advantage for me, is the ability to store artwork for individual tracks, as discussed further up the thread.
So for a greatest hits album, I will have all the tracks with the appropriate single artwork.
for me the biggest advantage is mobility. I do not need to care about cover.jpg files in folders when moving and coyping files. I wouldn’t like to have my tags in a separate file either 
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One would think you simply copy the folder. Fear of missing out on cover.jpg must pale in significance to that of missing out on an audio track. 
you could think that, but that’s not what I normally do
When tagging with mp3tag there is a function “tag to filename” which moves the audio files but not any cover files. So I’ll try to keep the graphics embedded in the files and therefore have them with cover on my iphones and in my car when coyping it over to a SD card.
I do not care too much about the file size increase which in my viewpoint would be the only valid argument against embedding.
ya, we fixed that behaviour in puddletag. It’s unfortunate there are many annoying anomalies in mp3tag that Florian wasn’t/ isn’t prepared to address.