Inventory & catalogue
How cover and item photos work in the Hub
4 min
A record in your shop carries an image, and a buyer reads that image as a promise. The Hub therefore distinguishes two kinds of image and is precise about where each comes from. This guide explains the difference, where the covers come from, why a cover is sometimes missing, and what you control yourself.
Two kinds of image
The product cover belongs to the release. It is the cover as issued, one per release, shown for every copy of that release in your shop and in every other shop on the Hub. It describes the title and says nothing about the condition of any particular record.
The photo of this copy belongs to one listing: the record you have on the shelf, photographed by you, with its ring wear, its seam split or its clean sleeve. It is yours and is shown to the buyer with a label saying it is a photo of this copy. Without that label, a buyer should read an image as illustrative.
Where the product cover comes from
Covers come from a public, openly licensed image collection tied to the same public music data the catalogue uses. Each cover is linked to the release, so the same release shows the same cover in every shop, and images are served through our own image proxy rather than loaded from a third party by your visitors' browsers. We keep these sources under review and are working on additional public cover sources.
Why a cover is sometimes missing
Because covers come from public sources, not every release has one. A private pressing, an older title or an obscure release may have no public cover, so the page shows a placeholder until a photo is added. This is the trade-off for images that are free to use, and it is exactly the gap your own photo fills.
The shared image pool
Product covers live in one central pool that every shop on the Hub draws from. A release with a cover has it for everyone at once; a release without one has none anywhere yet. That is the gap we want shops to be able to fill: if you upload a cover for a title that has none, we want to show it for other shops with the same title in due course. The platform terms already provide for this. You keep ownership of the photos you upload and grant RecordFlower a non-exclusive licence to store them, add them to the shared pool and show them with the release, in other shops as well. Only photos you upload yourself and hold the rights to fall under that licence. Adding shop photos to the pool is not live yet; today an uploaded photo stays with your own listing.
What you control
The photo of your copy. Add one or more photos of the record you are selling and they appear on your storefront with the label that they show this copy. They belong to that listing. For a graded second-hand record this is the photo that sells it, because it shows exactly what the buyer receives.
The label. The photo of this copy label is set per listing and shown to the buyer, so you do not have to explain in the description that the photo is real.
A wrong or missing cover. If the cover shown for a title is wrong or absent, add a photo of your own copy so buyers see the right sleeve, and tell us. Because the cover is shared, correcting it corrects it for every shop; how such a correction is reviewed is something we are still working out.
Watch out
Only upload photos you took yourself or are otherwise allowed to use. A photo saved from another webshop or a marketplace is not yours to publish, and once shop photos enter the shared pool, other shops would show it too. Under the platform terms you warrant that you hold the rights to what you upload, and you carry the claims if you do not.
Where this stands
Live today: the product cover from the public image collection, one per release, shared by every shop, and the labelled photo of this copy on your own listings. We are working on additional cover sources and on adding the covers shops upload to the shared pool; this guide is updated when that changes.