Album Art Image Quality

[imetral]

The album art in the player still looks like it's half the resolution of the image being used. Will there be a fix addressing this?

[maxmp]

Poweramp uses 512x152 and 1024x1024 (HD) textures, and downloads images up to 1024x1024 (normal) and 2048x2048 (hi-res). All the options are available in settings / Album Art, but if you have device with limited per-app memory settings, low-res screen, or older Androids (5/6), you better avoid enabling HD / 24bit album art as it will waste memory and push other images out of cache.

[imetral]

35 minutes ago, maxmp said:

Poweramp uses 512x152 and 1024x1024 (HD) textures, and downloads images up to 1024x1024 (normal) and 2048x2048 (hi-res). All the options are available in settings / Album Art, but if you have device with limited per-app memory settings, low-res screen, or older Androids (5/6), you better avoid enabling HD / 24bit album art as it will waste memory and push other images out of cache.

damn, alright. something must be up with my phone then bc i use upwards of 3000x3000 images and the artwork and text on the artwork especially looks softened. thanks for the quick reply.

[maxmp]

Btw 3kx3k will take (if Poweramp would not downscale them) 72mb (3000x3000x4 and finally x2 - don't ask - because this is Android:-) ) in RAM.  On some devices Poweramp is limited to 192-256mb.

[andrewilley]

I agree that 3000x3000 is probably wildly excessive, that must be making the file sizes a lot larger than necessary for no practical advantage that I can think of. Cover images are mostly used for thumbnails or displayed no wider than about 4 inches even on a large phone, or 6 or 7 inches on a tablet. Even on a large PC screen, 3000 pixel images are not necessary nor displayable.

Andre

[Abolfazl Ghorbani]

I Used to have large artworks embedded in my music too, but found this useful website:

https://www269.lunapic.com/editor/

Just upload your artwork and select scale image and scale it to 600x600 or whatever you like,It doesn't reduce quality at all, also you can edit your artwork, I always saturate colors a bit, brighten the darker ones etc... But that's up to you.

[imetral]

2 hours ago, Abolfazl Ghorbani said:

I Used to have large artworks embedded in my music too, but found this useful website:

https://www269.lunapic.com/editor/

Just upload your artwork and select scale image and scale it to 600x600 or whatever you like,It doesn't reduce quality at all, also you can edit your artwork, I always saturate colors a bit, brighten the darker ones etc... But that's up to you.

i usually just use Photoshop, i had no idea that site existed. 

[KristPom]

Does it make sense to take a different resolution from the original photo?

[ChadSt]

Oh, how interesting. Just went to read the news on the forum and came across an old thread that was raised to the top. Dude. I sincerely sympathize with you if you don't know how to behave in this forum. But for decency's sake I'd advise you to ai upscaling photo to play with your photos as much as you can. This applies not only to you, but to the author and others who don't know how to work in modern services. Photoshop isn't the only way to get great pics. Just try to do it online so you won't be disappointed with the results. Well, and the photos are more cool, not like through photoshop. 

[Fitzian]

Aye, if albumartexchange.com doesn't have an entry for a particular album, the likes of a tool such as bigjpg (on PC) can help to upscale low res images.

Then again, once it's been made "big" I end up using an automated workflow in mp3tag to resize to a specified size (800x800), export original art to source folder, then search in finder for any .jpgs in the whole directory, and copy them elsewhere. I saved a few gigabytes (!!!) on my 400gb card due to excessive album art sizes.

[andrewilley]

Personally, I wouldn't ever upscale an image just for embedded cover artwork if I couldn't find a better resolution original in the first place.

I would downsize excessively large images for file size though, these are only for quick display, not poster-size printing.

Andre

[MotleyG]

Even the albumartphiles on Albumartexchange max out at 1500x1500 for their site. And their rules for quality are pretty strict. The “standard” for iTunes on the other hand is 600x600, although I have seen them more recently use 800 and even 1k squared images now. I guess as storage continues to become less expensive, the image file sizes are creeping up along with the audio resolution and accompanying sizes as well.

As always, to each their own!

[andrewilley]

I've settled on 1000x1000 as a good target size these days. I have a few bigger, and some where I could only find maybe 500x500 (or that was what was in the file already). JPEG compression mostly keeps even 1000x1000 image down to around 150-400k.

Andre

[John Doe]

I always resize all of my album cover art to 500x500, whether it was originally 600x600 or 3000x3000. And don't embed your art into every file. That's a massive waste of space. Just put it in the same folder as your songs and name it "cover" (without the quotes). Even at that size my "Cover Art" folder (yes I have them all backed up on 2 HDD's) is 456 megs containing 4800 files. Imaging how much space that would be just for artwork if every song had embedded art.

[andrewilley]

@John Doe Placing cover images in folders only works if you have a tidily organised music collection where everything is stored in an album folder of its own. This is not always the case. And as with any sidecar style file system, you need to copy everything together, and each piece of software needs to recognise it. I do have a few folders set up like that, but mostly I prefer to have images embedded the files (if there are images at all; most of my singles don't).

Most of my music files are around 7-10Mb anyway, so a extra 100-200k per song for a JPEG image isn't really that big of a deal against the overall sizes of memory these days. In a 60Gb music collection, I'm really not that bothered that maybe 1Gb of that is images.

Andre

[John Doe]

3 hours ago, andrewilley said:

@John Doe Placing cover images in folders only works if you have a tidily organised music collection where everything is stored in an album folder of its own. This is not always the case.

Yikes. I guess I'm a bit anal about making everything just so. My library is a bit larger, though. 1.58TB as flacs converted to 581GB Q9 OGG Vorbis for mobile. For me, folder browsing is an absolute necessity.

 

Edited November 2, 2021 by John Doe

[MotleyG]

Personal preference with regard to embedding the artwork versus a cover.jpg or folder.jpg image in the folder structure. At 600x600, the average image size I have is 150-400k, versus lossless ALAC or FLAC files coming in around 30M. So each image is well under 1% of the total file size. Worth it IMO for compatibility with most players.

[andrewilley]

I usually use folder browsing too, but I'm pretty organised about having tags set correctly too. But with singles, of which I have 1,000+, one in-folder image makes no sense.

Andre

[GameX2]

On 12/11/2018 at 10:47 PM, maxmp said:

Poweramp uses 512x152 and 1024x1024 (HD) textures, and downloads images up to 1024x1024 (normal) and 2048x2048 (hi-res). All the options are available in settings / Album Art, but if you have device with limited per-app memory settings, low-res screen, or older Androids (5/6), you better avoid enabling HD / 24bit album art as it will waste memory and push other images out of cache.

  

On 12/3/2020 at 3:03 PM, maxmp said:

This limit is only for in-folder images. Tag based album art is already limited to 24mb (which is huge and resized anyway), and build 891 also updates this limit for in-folder images as well (on devices with 256+mb per-app memory).

So this means that embedded images, Poweramp will take any file size up to 24 MB no problem -

What's the optimal artwork dimension and file size we can safely push ?  I have a 4K monitor and I downloaded many artworks from Apple Music servers being up to 3000x3000.  Lately, I've been batch compressing them and downscaling them to 1500x1500px under 1 MB for Poweramp, I've noticed otherwise it downsample to 1250x1250px but 1500x1500px seems to preserve it.
 

How much does it downsample otherwise?  Could in theory 3000x3000px be embedded in the MP3 but at which file size would it take it ?  RAM usage for artwork depends on dimensions or file size ?  (Technical hehe, I don't know)

Thank you :)

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, GameX2 said:

So this means that embedded images, Poweramp will take any file size up to 24 MB no problem -

This is the limit for the header in the standard. Not really a Poweramp issue. If you max this out for just the image, there will be no headroom left for any other tags. 

if you really feel those images are necessary for use in your main library, consider using syncing software for your portable devices that will automatically change the artwork size when transferring.

[GameX2]

7 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

This is the limit for the header in the standard. Not really a Poweramp issue. If you max this out for just the image, there will be no headroom left for any other tags. 

if you really feel those images are necessary for use in your main library, consider using syncing software for your portable devices that will automatically change the artwork size when transferring.

Oh wow, super interesting!

It's not necessary, 24 MB is far too much, highest I've seen was 12 MB but was simply curious on image dimensions downsampling 🤔 

[andrewilley]

Personally I mostly treat album art as a glorified thumbnail, just so I can visually tell what's playing without reading the text tags (e.g. while driving). I certainly don't want full-screen 2160px images filling every pixel of a large 4K PC monitor - let alone a three-inch wide phone screen.

Most of my embedded images are around 1000x1000 JPEGs, coming in at around 150-300 Kb, as I don't want to unnecessarily waste storage space. A very few are as big as 1500x1500, but that's mostly because that's the way I got them.

Andre