I am a huge fan of this feature, and as an actual Art Director I love nothing more than finding the best image of all my artists as a rule! Will we eventually get the opportunity to edit the Artist Avatar and Banner independently? As of now you can choose not to go with the community chosen Banner, but this means that the Avatar is now a cropped version of the same image and you do not have the option of separating the two currently.
Keep up the good work gang, and I look forward to more functionality in this space. For now I will continue to obsessively adjust, crop and upload…
I’ve been adding thousands of images over a long period of time, and it would be really cool if there was an easy way to get them transferred to art director.
FWIW I just started to “contribute.” The quote marks are because I have no way of knowing what value judgments anyone else has. But I’m centering / cropping images at the Art Director webpage.
My thought is that if Roon doesn’t want this to be haphazard affair, a few basic photo editing “best practices” might be published. Such as don’t “cut off” limbs at joints when cropping. It’s OK to crop “though” foreheads or forearms … our brains naturally fill in the missing parts. Maybe try for a rule of thirds perspective for banners.
I tried to write those rules, and failed to do so…
I did write a big of a faq/instructions (see “Tips” in the upper right, which used to be called “Help” but no one read it).
What I’ve seen is that some people are really good at this and some are exceptionally bad. The nice thing is that the good ones tend to fix the bad ones quickly.
If you have some suggestions @David_Deckert, I’m happy to take them and add them to the FAQ or make a new strategy guide…
Unfortunately most of those pictures can’t be shared with Roon.
Jim is right here. Most of the stuff on Wikipedia is shared under CC BY-SA 3.0, which requires that you attribute the author. The system that Roon provides, does not provide a means to give proper attribution.
How it currently stands, pretty much the only way you can safely upload a picture now is if you are the author yourself and give Roon permission to use it.
I would love to see how many of those who uploaded pictures actually verified all of this. I’d wager the majority of the pictures do not comply.
And the irony of all this is that Roon has almost no way to verify whether the uploaded pictures violate copyrights, unless somebody requests a DMCA takedown.
Now that I’ve made over 100 improvements to artist artwork and added a small number of promo shots to empty profiles (with all the appropriate clearances) I can say with confidence that Art Director is a fantastic optional feature that will improve Roon for every user with an aesthetic sensibility.
I think the crowdsourcing model employed here is the best (and likely the only) way to populate empty profiles for less prominent independent artists and in my experience these artists have offered much better quality promo images for use on Roon than those I was seeking to clear myself.
I feel that fans like myself are more likely to respect copyright for fear of harming their heroes or those close to them so empty profiles filled via Art Director are likely to be more carefully and fairly curated than some denizens of the Roon forum predict.
The peeps that edit should really consider that resolution demand must be met for an acceptable result.
Also the weird introduction of band/artist logos rather than pictures, no thank you!
While browsing artists and albums the images display is not the buttery smooth experience of other software. I have always liked that Roon didn’t expect me to scroll through 10K albums to cache their thumbnails, now i need to…
Is there (or will be) a way to “redirect” images from one artist to other?
While checking “The 69 Eyes” I came across several individual band member photos, which wouldn’t belong to the band page but could be used for the musician’s profile.
Of course! But if folks select a 800px image before a 1920px for a banner it might look nice on a small tablet or phone but will hardly be acceptable on a bigger iPad or PC Screen.
Humm not sure about that. The only way I see this being a major issue is if you have zoomed your pc screen beyond 100%.
In principle I agree but I practise I have not seen one image that offends me due to pixel count.
check the Metallica banner…not the best quality for a band that has a lot of hi res photos out there. It’s not awful, and I agree with you about low quality over no image at all, but I think it could be better.
Anyway, I think Roon tends to compress images, because I’ve uploaded my own images, which looked great on Photoshop, but once uploaded they showed a slight degree of pixelation, especially annoying in color transitions.
