My album art web site reaches 10,000 covers
Given how many millions of albums exist our there in the world, 10,000 album covers is only a drop in the bucket. But considering that I started the site with fewer than 500 of my own album covers around eight months ago, when I first opened up AlbumArtExchange.com for image contributions from other members of the web site, and the picky quality standards I'm asking contributors to meet, I'm kind of surprised at the rate of growth.
While it might still be hard for people to find just what they want at AlbumArtExchange.com, the odds of finding something you can use have gone up quite a bit now that it's not just my own personal quirky taste in music governing what can be found on the web site. (I recently had to re-code the key word search I wrote for searching the image gallery. I knew the search I'd first written wasn't terribly efficient, but that didn't matter when the image count was in the low thousands. Response time started sucking badly, however, somewhere past 5000-6000 images.)
The whole point of the web site is to provide better image quality than you can get from other web sites, or even from iTunes automatic downloads. For the most part I think the web site is achieving that goal. A few of the contributors have been posting some stunningly nice images. On the other end of the spectrum, a few posters don't seem to get what the site is about, and have posted some real crap.
I try to weed the crap out when I can, either deleting low-quality images or flagging them as "needs work", to mark them as potential source material to be used by someone else with the time and the image editing skills to improve those images and resubmit them.
I haven't had the time to police everything that gets submitted, but last week I cobbled together an admin/moderator system which allows two moderators whom I've appointed to delete, flag, or edit the tagging of images, and then allows me as admin to approve or revert their changes.
What kind of image quality am I looking for?
My typical scanning and editing process
Yes, I'd like all image posters to be THIS anal retentive!
Before and After -- Show off your image editing mojo
It's hard to be a complete tyrant about image quality, however. I appreciate the efforts being made by the contributors too much to delete or flag every image that doesn't meet my very fussy standards. Every once in a while I re-edit some of the posts others have made, but that can only be an occasional thing, because if I tried to improve every image flaw I spot I'd have no time for anything else -- I'm having fun with this site as a hobby, but I don't want to make it my life.
Well, unless I could make a living at it!
While that is incredibly doubtful, I'm beginning to get enough traffic that I might be able to generate a little lunch money from the site. I suppose I should look into what it would take to slap a few Google Ads up on the site one of these days.
While it might still be hard for people to find just what they want at AlbumArtExchange.com, the odds of finding something you can use have gone up quite a bit now that it's not just my own personal quirky taste in music governing what can be found on the web site. (I recently had to re-code the key word search I wrote for searching the image gallery. I knew the search I'd first written wasn't terribly efficient, but that didn't matter when the image count was in the low thousands. Response time started sucking badly, however, somewhere past 5000-6000 images.)
The whole point of the web site is to provide better image quality than you can get from other web sites, or even from iTunes automatic downloads. For the most part I think the web site is achieving that goal. A few of the contributors have been posting some stunningly nice images. On the other end of the spectrum, a few posters don't seem to get what the site is about, and have posted some real crap.
I try to weed the crap out when I can, either deleting low-quality images or flagging them as "needs work", to mark them as potential source material to be used by someone else with the time and the image editing skills to improve those images and resubmit them.
I haven't had the time to police everything that gets submitted, but last week I cobbled together an admin/moderator system which allows two moderators whom I've appointed to delete, flag, or edit the tagging of images, and then allows me as admin to approve or revert their changes.
What kind of image quality am I looking for?
My typical scanning and editing process
Yes, I'd like all image posters to be THIS anal retentive!
Before and After -- Show off your image editing mojo
It's hard to be a complete tyrant about image quality, however. I appreciate the efforts being made by the contributors too much to delete or flag every image that doesn't meet my very fussy standards. Every once in a while I re-edit some of the posts others have made, but that can only be an occasional thing, because if I tried to improve every image flaw I spot I'd have no time for anything else -- I'm having fun with this site as a hobby, but I don't want to make it my life.
Well, unless I could make a living at it!
While that is incredibly doubtful, I'm beginning to get enough traffic that I might be able to generate a little lunch money from the site. I suppose I should look into what it would take to slap a few Google Ads up on the site one of these days.
Comments
What is this "album" that you speak of
An "album" is simply a collection, in this case a collection of music. Music CDs are albums. Collections of related songs, issued together under a common title, stored on a hard drive or any other media are albums. If you're trying to imply album = vinyl, I don't go along with that usage.
Interesting stuff. No wonder you haven't been posting as much lately!
Any liability concerns?
Any liability concerns?
Given the fact that so much of this artwork is already freely available online from so many sources I can't see anyone being likely to give me trouble about copyright issues.
In an effort to cover my ass a little anyway, there's a disclaimer on the site that states I'm not claiming copyright to any of the images posted. This disclaimer appears beneath every full-sized view of an image, along with the statement that I'll take down any images which I'm requested to remove by those who do hold the copyrights.
Further, I encourage posters to add "where to buy" links, so that my site can help to promote sales of the albums which are displayed. When posters don't add those links, one of the moderators or I often add links ourselves. When such a link has been added, clicking on an album title takes you to the "where to buy" address.
At the moment I'm working on adding a ratings system so members of the web site can rate the content.
Apple can really use your services!
Before
After