Standardized artist image database from last.fm

Without album art, a media view is just list of text where you have to identify items by their names. Using album art helps you visualize your library and pick out an album by a visual symbol. Though even as more media views utilize album art, artists usually still have to be listed in plain text, giving you little visual cue to distinguish one by. And the artist list can just look a little bland.

However, one great way to provide visual symbols for artists is to display unique images of each one. Last.fm has an excellent library of images for artists uploaded and voted on by users, which provides a changing, unique picture to identify each artist by. An add-on could retrieve the current top images for each artist from last.fm and use them next to artist names or in some other way to visually represent each artist. It could also refresh the collection of images after a specified period of time to change things up.

Using these artists images it not a new idea; in fact, the ♪Photo add-on already does it. The problem, however, is that the add-on needs to save the images in a database on the user's hard drive, and if other add-ons want to utilize last.fm artist images as well, they might waste space and effort by making an entire separate database. I think that we should set a standard for this database so that multiple add-ons can access it if they need to. This could make it easier for add-on developers to utilize these images for an add-on, and it would keep the images organized in one place so hard drive space isn't unnecessarily taken up.

I have thought of a few neat ways these images could be used by add-ons. ♪Photo, of course, is already a really fun example:


In the Awesome Library Bar topic, I posted this mock-up which uses an artist image in the search results to help you visually identify the artist you are searching for:


Simon, who is working on developing the add-on, mentioned some uncertainty here about where to store the images, which gave me the idea to have a standardized database that multiple add-ons could use.

I also posted a mockup here showing how artist images could be used in a simple filter list to help you distinguish artists a bit, and to spice up the interface:


Using artist images like this is something I have never seen in another music program before, and I think it could really make using Songbird unique.