Cover Photos "Disappearing"

I have been adding books to my collection from the Amazon.com books. When I find a book it will have a stock cover photo. I will add it to my collection. When I go back and look at my books about 5%-10% of those cover photos are not there. Somehow going from finding, adding, and then viewing them later, those cover photos are being lost. In many instances I will go through the process of adding the book a second time, and the cover photo is there in the Amazon.com books. I will then save the photo from there to my computer, and then manually add it on my own, and it works fine and stays there when I do that. Any recommendations or feedback on this?

>1 MajMRichardson:

That is an ongoing issue with Amazon. If they delete or change a photo (and just using a different edition means there's likely a different image link), the one here will change or disappear. It's not a bug on LT's end. It is always best to use a different source for the photo (indeed, for any data you care about). If there's a member-uploaded photo, you can use that. I will often do an image search on Google and find an image from another source that way.

Closing as not a bug (at least, not an LT bug).

>1 MajMRichardson: Amazon sometimes changes their cover images, any Amazon-provided covers that you use could be unstable.

You can either select a cover from the available "member-uploaded covers" or add one yourself.* Those will be stable.

*If you find a cover image that you like somewhere on the internet, you don't need to save it to your computer and then upload. You can just right-click on the image, click "copy image link", and then paste that into the box on the cover image page that says "grab one from the web"

Also of note, when you are adding books, that cover is not going to translate across. Even if the proper cover is shown.
The book is added, then -- IF you are using Amazon covers -- whatever cover Amazon has listed for your ISBN/book will be the one used. If it doesn't have a cover in the Librarything link system, or there is no ISBN, there will be no cover until you add it.

Thanks very much to everyone for all of the feedback! I will keep all of those things in mind and work through them.

>5 MajMRichardson: I usually use the cover from the LT main page for the book. Then the URL is pointing to LT’s stored copy. There are a couple of steps involved. Try to get LT’s book cover on the screen and click on it and choose “copy the link” from the drop-down list. It will look something like the following - that is it will have pics.can.LibraryThing as the root of the URL.
https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/0d/53/0d53c9e1eefdd2c592f49745441414...

>6 kjuliff: If you want to use a cover that is already in LT, there is no need to copy the URL and upload it again. You can click on the LT cover you want and select "use this cover". If you copy the URL of an LT cover and upload it again you're just adding an unnecessary duplicate to the system

>7 norabelle414: I’m talking about using the cover in a post. How would you get the cover into the post in the first place without using hypertext?

>8 kjuliff: That isn't what the OP is referring to when they speak of covers disappearing. And irrelevant to the conversation

>9 gilroy: I understand what the OP was having trouble with. I understand why the covers from Amazon “disappear”. I was trying to help out with a solution in general, as it’s not necessary for people to download covers. I do not think it was irrelevant. The topic has been closed by LT.

I really do wish LT would add a message somewhere about this for unwary users, before they wind up with thousands of books without covers that they actually carefully chose covers for (like I did).

>11 the_red_shoes: I really do wish LT would add a message somewhere about... (Amazon covers).

There is a message now that shows up in one or two places -- I think it was in the cover information box. Not in the "Change cover" section, I concede. But LT is aware of the problem; one may hope the warning will gradually spread.

Certainly it is information I could have used when I first joined LT and chose a whole bunch of covers which have since disappeared.

Note that it is possible to find one's Amazon covers (e.g. in Charts & Graphs) and try to do a mass correction.

>8 kjuliff: The question was not about using covers (or other images) in Talk posts. It's about assigning covers to books in the catalog.

>12 waltzmn: Yeah, it's just aggravating because the book covers are part of the data I want to keep here, and I was very careful about making sure they all had the right ones when I started out!

It seems there might be a glitch in the system when fetching and saving cover photos. Meanwhile, manually saving and adding cover photos as you've done can serve as a temporary workaround.

>15 TyrelRohan: It's not a glitch. It's the way it works. Amazon covers are not saved on LT servers. They are pulled from Amazon each time. That's how Amazon wants it to be done. What is saved is that you have chosen the Amazon cover for a certain ISBN. If you choose an Amazon cover you are choosing to connect your entry to Amazon. How LT may use Amazon data is Amazon's decision. LT does it their way or not at all.

Using a member cover, whether your own or from another member is choosing an image on LT servers. This is not a 'temporary workaround', it is a permanent fix.

It is very clear on the covers page which covers are from Amazon and which are member covers. You can say in your settings that you do not want Amazon covers.

There can be problems with other Amazon data as well. The other data you use from Amazon will not change, and Amazon's own data has gotten a lot better over the last 15 years. They are often the only source for upcoming and very recent books. I use them routinely for brand new books in German. However, for older books the data is often from their marketplace partners and can be very bad. Since older books are usually found in library sources, using Overcat and other library sources makes sense for anything that was published at least 6 months ago.

Hello everyone, I suddenly saw that pictures I have been uploading for covers (pictures I took) but also pictures I grabbed are now not showing up. I have all my books with pictures, almost 3000 books. Why is this happening? Any advise would be welcome.

>17 studiocp: There’s currently a problem with a server. See https://www.librarything.com/topic/365996#8680015

Thanks for the update, was just about to ask about this, myself.

>18 Charon07: Thank you very much for the prompt!