Issue with Album Covers and Artist Photos in Ampache API Responses

[Eilgnaw]

Thank you for creating this app.
While using it, I’ve encountered a few issues. I briefly looked through the code and noticed that album covers seem to be re-downloaded every time.
In the response from ampache/server/json.server.php?action=albums, there doesn’t appear to be a field for the album cover image URL.
Additionally, I found that when I upload an artist photo, the album cover is also replaced with the artist photo, and the response from action=albums treats the artist photo as the album cover.
Since album covers and artist photos are displayed separately on iOS Dynamic Island, I’d like to be able to fetch them both.

[paulijar]

In the response to the Ampache action=albums, there is the field art containing the album cover URL. This URL is such that it's bound to the API key but not to the active session, meaning that the same URL remains valid between sessions and the Music app does even set the caching headers on the response. Hence, we are doing everything we can to enable the client to cache the cover art but ultimately it's up to the client to decide if it does that or does it reload the cover from the server every time.

For album covers, the app prefers to use the cover art embedded in the audio file. But if that's absent, then it will grab any image file uploaded to the same folder with the audio file and use that as the cover. But replacing an existing album cover image with a newly uploaded artist image is something the app should not do. Did I understand correctly, that you have seen this kind of happening?

However, once the application has selected some image to be used as an album cover, it doesn't anymore change this selection even if you upload new images to the folder. This may be problematic as has been reported in #633.

[Eilgnaw]

@paulijar Thank you for your reply.
I think first we need to distinguish between artist photos and album covers.

We can use Last.fm to retrieve album information (MBID), artist information (MBID), and album cover images (URL).

The cover images (which can be named using the MBID) should be stored in the music directory or another location, while artist photos should be uploaded by the user.

This way, when retrieving data through the API, both albums and artists will have their own respective images.

The current situation is that when I don’t upload any images, the album cover from Last.fm is only loaded when I open the album details, and at that point the art field in Ampache?action=albums is still empty.

Because I noticed that the album covers returned from Last.fm are not being saved (unless I misunderstood the code), they cannot be opened even if they are returned.

When I upload an image named the artist name, the art field in Ampache?action=albums becomes that uploaded image, even though it should actually be the artist’s photo.

I also tried uploading an image named the album name, but it didn’t seem to have any effect.

[Eilgnaw]

https://www.theaudiodb.com/api/v1/json/123/artist-mb.php?i=0827063c-b93d-48bd-abc4-04ce2fbc45d7 This is an API to get photos of artists.

[paulijar]

Yes, the album cover from Last.fm is not saved to a file so it will not be used anywhere else except in the details pane.

The logic for picking up an image to be used as an album art has been basically unchanged for the past 12 years but maybe it is a tad too aggressive in selecting just any image from the same folder as an album cover. At the time that logic was originally developed, there was no support for Last.fm and no support for artist images at all and those features were still many years in the future.