My Movies Wiki

Disc Title Covers

Modified: 2019/06/06 17:21 by admin - Uncategorized
Introduction

Covers on disc title profiles, and the quality of these covers is very important to the majority of our users, and we therefore have high quality standards when contributing disc title covers to the service. This page will help you with some of the most important things to be aware of when contributing covers, and it will help you with some best practices to ensure that your contributed covers meets these standards, and can be approved by our moderators.

Barcodes

Before contributing a cover to a disc title profile, it is important that you ensure that the title you are contributing to holds the exact same barcode as the title you have in hand, and that the barcode displayed on the contributed covers also match the barcode listed on the profile. There are many different editions of each movie and double checking the barcode ensures that you have the correct title, before contributing, and not a different release of the same movie.

In the situation where a title does not hold a barcode, the profile will be created with a generic barcode of 12 zeros (000000000000), and to such profiles you may only contribute covers without any barcodes displayed anywhere on the covers. These titles will typically already contain full covers, as either full covers or evidence photos was required for the profile to be created, and if you are looking to contribute higher quality covers to a profile without a barcode, you need to ensure that the covers you have is visually the same as the existing ones on the profile, because without a barcode, you otherwise cannot be sure that the title you have is the same release as the title you are contributing to.

No Camera Photos

Camera photos are in no situation allowed to be contributed to the service for quality reasons - covers must either be scans or original studio material. It is impossible to perfectly align a camera photo as it is with a flatbed scanner, and cameras are very much depending on light conditions in the room, and will reflect surroundings and with flashes have glares.

We know that it can be frustrating that you are not allowed to contribute a camera photo when a title does not already hold a cover, and you perhaps do not own a flatbed scanner, or a multi-function printer with a built-in scanner, however, we do not operate on a something is better than nothing base with our service - if a title does not hold a cover, other users are often inclined to contribute one, but if we allowed camera photos, and a camera photo was contributed, very often, a proper scan would not be contributed later on.

In the end, having a mix of camera photos and proper scans looks awful in lists where multiple title covers are listed together, and we hope for your understanding in why the quality in this situation has a higher priority than the individual users request for a title to hold a camera photo cover.

Notice! Scanning apps on mobile devices are still camera photos and NOT scans - the scanner apps will help you align the cover better, but will otherwise still be affected by all the issues causing us to not accept camera photos.

Resolution

The maximum resolution the service stores for a cover is 300 dpi - you may scan and store higher resolution covers locally, but the covers will then be down-scaled on the service to 300 dpi. It is recommended that you always provide the covers in the maximum resolution you can up to 300 dpi. There are no minimum requirements on the resolution of covers, except that the cover quality must be high enough for us to clearly confirm the barcode displayed on the cover.

Scanning

With covers in cases where you can remove the paper from the cover, it is always recommended to remove the paper from the cover, and scan the paper alone, without the cover as one scan for both front and back - with other covers it will be needed to scan the front and back separately.

Some special covers in metal cases, such as steelbooks can be difficult to scan in a good quality, depending on the equipment, as the light of scanner causes a reflection, resulting in a very dark scan, or in other ways a scan that looks very different to the actual cover. One trick that will work well with most equipments is to place a plastic sheet between the cover and the scanner.

Technically, when scanning covers, it can be of benefit to scan in 450 or 600 dpi, and then down-scale the covers in a photo editor to 300 dpi, as this can often make dust, scratches and other scanning artefacts less visible.

Again, scanning apps on mobile devices are still camera photos and NOT scans - see the section about no camera photos for details.

Matching Front and Back