From off 0.9y-5 a few new Coverart features have been made available which really need some attention to do things as they are supposed to;
Notice that at the moment of this writing this version is not public yet. The outlay anticipates on the somewhat more experienced user (hence is more brief).
All anticipates on downloads and the sometimes ridiculeous sizes of coverart, really making everything unncessarily slow. Besides, at using an SSD for the OS "disk" and Coverart, the SSD will be full much sooner than you wanted. So this is about resizing those pictures without actually loosing on quality of them. Here goes :
Important : All of the below assumes that the main Coverart picture (normally the one being called Folder.jpg) has already been resized to acceptable proportions of (e.g.) 500 x 500 and a size in Kilobytes of no more than the below is about (like 500KB). Don't try to understand this right now; it will become clear at practicing the process.
As important : Don't start off right away with this at reading it. More down the line is a procedure described for making a backup first !
This parameter is used for telling the system that you want the (general) Coverart to be resized to the maximum height or width according to this setting. Notice that 3000 is a good setting for being able to read booklets easily when enlarged (never mind 500 is shown here).
Thus, any Coverart picture with a size of e.g. (W x H) 5200 x 4100 will be resized to 3000 x H at maintaining the aspect ratio. Similarly, a picture of 3200 x 4000 will be resized to W x 3000.
This is your main "key" for resizing, because the dimensions of the picture determine (for you) whether the result remains readable.
So, first we are going to deal with the "Main Coverart", being the front cover of the CD album. For this, the 500x500 is a good size, because it matches the physical size of the CD on a 96dpi (dots per inch) monitor. 96dpi is very common.
Important : Because later we are going to deal with all the Coverart in one pile - while our selection for that is the size in (kilo) bytes, it is important that the Main Coverart has been dealt with first, so it won't fit the selection of the General Coverart anymore. So, let's assume that our General Coverart will be limited by us to 1000KB (1MB) and our Main Coverart to 500KB. This means that if we're now first going to do that Main Coverart, it won't fit the selection "1000KB at least" lateron, when we will be doing the General Coverart.
Also, try to understand this :
The General Coverart should stay at larger dimensions, so we can conveniently zoom and read the small texts. This goes along with a decently good JPEG quality, and at a dimension of 3000 x 3000 the 1000KB encourages for that decent(ly enough) quality. Now, the Main Coverart is never something to zoom into, since there's actually no small texts to read on the front cover. But, you want it the best quality anyway, because it will be the picture shown during playback. It should be as good as a good photo. This means that while the dimensions don't need to be large at all (you could say : never larger than your physical screen size in pixels), the KB size should be sufficiently large to let JPEG not compress too much. And so it is perfectly allowed to have a dimension of 500x500 at 500KB which is relatively very good.
Whether this is understandable or not, keep in mind the golden rule : the Main Coverart must be (made) smaller than the General Coverart and it must be done FIRST, or otherwise the Main Coverart gets selected at resizing the General Coverart.
Also keep in mind that the Resizing will never let grow dimensions. Only smaller.
Allright. How can we get our Main Coverart subject to this resizing. Look here :
I selected all the Items (album view !) in the middle pane, and next chose "Show all Main Coverart from selection in right pane". In the mean time I can enter that 500(KB) and what will happen is that only those Main Coverart pictures larger than 500KB will show in the right pane, at clicking Go.
In my case this is the result, and as you can see all fit the criterium of being larger than 500KB, and one of the reasons this is so, is because they are just unnecessarily large for their dimensions. Btw, the top most picture not being Main Coverart at all, but possibly there wasn't anything better. But let's see :
which leads to
Indeed, nothing better is there. Well, I decide to let that picture be (I will look up a Main Coverart picture from somewhere), but deal with the other three :
As you can see I selected only the three I want, and now choose Overwrite. Why ? well, actually nothing else works decently because my Main Coverart is my Main Coverart as it shows, and letting the system make a different name of it, may show different pictures for Main Coverart after I'm done. Or, nothing changes and I still have to deal with that unnessecarily large picture to show.
When we click the option, we see this :
Clicking No skips the Item, clicking Yes overwrites it as indicated, Yes to All proceeds on them all without notice (may take a long time !), and Stop just quits the whole procedure.
When all are done, this is indicated so by means of a "Done" message.
If I again ask for the Alizée picture (but now enter a small KB amount for the selection), we see this :
So yes, the picture has been resized to 500 x 500 (coincidentally square here, but keep in mind the Aspect Ratio is always maintained !), but the KB size is 191 only ! This is because the picture was relatively small in KB Size for its original dimension (913KB @ 1335 x 1335) and since there is no reason to make it bigger than needed, that won't happen.
It takes some practice to get the idea of how small pictures get for a given dimension (or how large they remain), but keep in mind that the more variation there is in the picture, the more KB Size is needs. Also to keep in mind is that we are working the other way around ! Thus, we *state* the maximum output KB Size, which means that pictures may receive a too low quality when we test with the wrong picture ! Look at the Alizée picture again ... not much variation in there, right ? Therefore you can better test with something like this one :
Well, after all the Main Coverart has been done, we can proceed with the General Coverart.
Notice that the below is a kind of repeat, because it has been written earlier than the above about the Main Coverart, which functionality didn't exist yet at the first writing of this topic.
What you see above is the Library Area with selected Items (say, all of them showed in there), and rightclick on one of them, in the end showing the option "Show all Coverart from selection in the right pane", while the "1000" showing at the mouse pointer denotes the size in KiloBytes a Coverart picture must be at mininum to show in the right pane. So, what we are actually are going to ask for is the Coverart larger than 1000KB (1MB) to show in the right pane, and we are about to make them smaller than this 1000KB.
Notice that this 1000KB nicely goes along with the H x W size of 3000 (pixels) we denoted in the Setting above. Thus, what will happen is that we tell the system that ay picture which should be decimated to a size for 3000 pixels height or width (whichever is the largest) should be saved with a maximum size in bytes of 1000 Kilobytes. For nitpickers : 1 KiloByte is 1024 bytes..
More generally, what we are going to do is ask the system for storing our Coverart pictures at the dimensions we ask for, saving it at the best "JPEG" quality possible, so the given amount in KiloBytes is not exceeded.
After clicking Go (see above screen shot) you may run into the following :
A bunch of pictures not bearing the proper rotation. Easy to solve : Click those needing a rotation in a certain direction, and :
click the option to losslessly rotate the picture. Notice that "losslessly" means without any means of degradation.
After this has been arranged for, and you again asked for the Coverart larger than the KBSize as per the setting explained more above, this is what you'll end up with :
... all Coverart of a larger size than per that Setting BUT, notice the top most picture here. You see ? it is smaller than the size as set per the Settings Area Setting of 3000, but it appears because it is larger than our setting of 1000KB. Now, notice that a picture will never receive a larger dimension than its original, so this topost picture will stay at its 837 x 1920 dimension, and it should shrink to less than 1000KB for byte size (see below).
Now, let's say we want to test around a bit, and see what happens to the picture and its quality when we'd proceed on this. Instead, we do not really, but do as the below :
This saves the picture as we want but leaved the original how it is, and the saved picture will reive a name added with "-1" (or "-2" if "-1" already exists). Our top most picture will be named img862-1.jpg if we proceed with this. Just try it !
Notice that you can easily delete such a "-1" picture (or any picture for that matter) with the "Delete file(s) from disk ..." option from the menu shown above.
After some practicing, and knowing for sure what we want, we are about the perform the real thing. Or ? No, maybe we first do this :
Just read the tooltip in the screen shot, and you'll get the idea. In the end this just makes a copy of all your coverart data, without taking the music data along with it.
Btw, by now (the above was written a few days back and things have changed a bit) the above "Backup" option is named like that :
All set ?, then it's time for the real stuff :
So yes, this really throws out all your too large JPegs, TIIFs, PNGs, BMPs and anything, and saves it to a JPeg of the best quality which can be met according to your given dimensions and the byte size wanted. And to keep in mind : 3000 pixels at 1000KB is a good setting which creates acceptable sized Coverart files which are perfectly readable for "booklet" data.
Allright, once this has been performed (and take into account a total of 10 minutes for asking for the large sized coverart plus resizing them per 225 too large Items !), it is always a good thing to *again* ask for the too large Coverart Items just by repeating the process. If all is right nothing comes from it anymore because everyting has been resized accordingly, but maybe an error occurred underway that got unnoticed, and thus you can always check how things worked out.
If all is right, something like this remains :
which are no image files to begin with. However, it can also happen that files remain unexpectedly, and this may be (for instance) very large files which caused an Out of memory error during the (large) process, but which well may go when processing them again, on their own.
