Cover Images

I'm in the process of doing an overhaul of all the cover images. While users shouldn't see any differences, there are a number of things that are changing behind the scenes:

1) Cover images displayed on the site (band, album, artist, etc pages) will now be either: JPG or PNG and no longer GIFs.
Note: all "master" images loaded to the site can still be of any file type.

2) Cover images displayed will no longer be of the format:
[www.bandtoband.com] http://www.bandtoband.com/images/covers/144/01/1.gif (no longer functioning)

but instead look like:
[cdn.bandtoband.com] http://cdn.bandtoband.com/minor-threat-out-of-step.jpg

3) These cover images are hosted on albums.bandtoband.com, which is an alias for Amazon's web services. This allows me to offload the image loading to a larger system with better delivery capabilities.

4) Once all the images have been processed behind the scenes, I'll have more flexibility in relocating the site to a different host where I can have better control over software packages, etc allowing for betting image processing such as auto creation of transparent images from master images (a Matt Westwood request long ago).


The 54k cover images are in the process of being created from the master images. This process will take a few weeks, I have to do it slowly to watch for any errors and in the process try and find things like "No Cover" images improperly placed. If you see any trouble with cover images, please let me know.

Thanks.


Kevin

Hi Kevin,

I didn't really understand the part about "auto creation of transparent images from master images". Can we still make transparent images, e.g. if we have to crop cassettes, or digipacks, or records without picture sleeves? Is there a file format we can use that supports transparent bits?
Thanks,
Zac.

Zac,

Sorry for the confusion. Right now there is no change in how things work. You still have to make transparent images from cropped cassette images, etc. In the future I hope to help automate that process and when we get there, I'll let everyone know. Thanks.


Kevin