Very, very recently, I've seen an enormous reduction of album art from Google and Bing searches. Amazon, which had been a go-to source for large album art images, has been reducing the size of images to a fraction seen just a month ago.
Am I the only one noticing this?
Are there other sources of large album art (1000 × 1000 pixels and up) that do not require subscriptions to online services?
I am ripping my own collection. I can scan these covers, but that just slows the process down by magnitudes of order.
You need to register to have access, but most images are avaialble in up to 1500x1500 and have been well curated by the members. There is no way to automate this that I am aware of, so each album needs to be found on their site. Less covers than other methods may find, but definitely my first stop for quality over quantity.
Thank you! I created an account at Album Art Exchange and downloaded AlbumArtDownloader.
I now have no doubt that album art is disappearing from Google and Bing searches—I'm not seeing the dozens of covers I used to see for even popular releases, and large images are an absolute rarity. Amazon is definitely changing the artwork displayed for releases, shrinking covers to thumbnail size or less while adding interior or reverse cover shots.
Perhaps this is another sad reflection of the move from physical to digital media.
I would need someone to walk me through that. I think F11 or F12 reveals the source code of a web page. I'm ignorant as to what to do, thereafter.
Google searches now tend to reveal Amazon as the sole source for album art on the web. All the other results one would normally see with each search are gone. Even with Size set to Large, the Amazon image will link to a tiny thumbnail, although we often saw something 1000 × 1000 pixels and larger just weeks ago.
Bing searches are yielding more results than Google, but not as many as were revealed weeks ago.
It's easy: After opening the amazon product page like this, click once on the small cover and then press F12. Click on the first icon in the Dev Tools (called "Select an element in the page...") and click on the cover again.
This should reveal the real direct download URL and also shows the covers dimensions.
You could also right click on the big cover and choose "Save picture as"
, that the same GUID is valid as artist ID on MusicBrainz:
