AlbumAesthetics

For those haunted in their sleep by pixelated nightmares

PLEASE NOTE THIS PROJECT IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED AND IS HERE FOR HISTORICAL PURPOSES. Take my word for it though, I promise you it worked at some point.

Soooo what's the point?

For those of us that purchase music from places other than Amazon, Google Music, and iTunes, we are burdened with either low quality or no album art at all leaving us sad. Given a string to search for on Google Images, this program finds the highest resolution square(ish) photo and downloads it for you (within a default of 20 pixels of square so a 1500 x 1480 image would be downloaded)

Installation

Prerequisites - You MUST have python 2.7+ installed. You'll need to have the BeautifulSoup python package installed. On Unix/Linux systems, this can be installed with pip

pip install BeautifulSoup

Install Album Aesthetics with the git clone command

git clone https://www.github.com/trdan6577/albumaesthetics.git

Yes, you too can bask in the HD glory (usage)

Currently, the only way to run it is from the command line:

python albumAesthetics.py "artist name and their album in quotes"

This is the most basic way to run the program. This results in the image and a .txt file being placed in the same directory as the program. The .txt file contains the link where the image came from.

Don't care where the image came from?

Use the '-n' or '--no-source-file' option to download just the image

Wait a sec, +-20 pixels means the image might not be exactly square!!!

Yep, great mathematical induction friend! If you want a perfectly square image, use the '-t TOLERANCE' or '--tolerance TOLERANCE' option where TOLERANCE is the number of pixels from square you'll allow. There are some decent ones with '-t 100'

I just want to upload these images to another site

Some sites allow you to upload a photo by giving them a link. If you want the link to the image, use the '-u' or '--url-only' options. Note that using this option does NOT create the .txt file in your local directory

Entering in one search at a time is so tedious!

Search more than 1 album/artist combination by seperating them with colons in the quotes. Example:

python albumAesthetics.py "a day to remember for those who have heart:twenty one pilots blurryface:ac dc back in black"

WHAT THE HELL?? ENTERING ALL OF THEM AT ONCE IS EVEN MORE TEDIOUS!!!!

If you keep a well organized music library where all of the folders are artists and those subfolders are their albums and inside the album subfolders are the music, then I have wonderful news for you. You can place albumAesthetics.py in your music folder and then run it from the command line with:

python albumAesthetics.py "scanner"

and it will go through all of your folders and place the appropriate album art in each one. Additionally, it looks to see if you already have an image downloaded (.jpg, .png, .gif, .jpeg) in your directory before downloading another one. This means if you add a couple songs to your library, albumAesthetics won't redownload ALL of your images again - only the new ones. Don't feel like moving your program to your music directory? Do:

python albumAesthetics.py "scanner:path/to/your/music/directory"

What gives? Your program downloaded a 200x200 image and I see a higher one here on Google(TM)!

Sometimes images advertise themselves as being a particular size even though they are dirty liars. Example: an image will be advertised as being 700x700, but it's just a 200x200 image blown up. If this happens to you, try using the 's' or '--second-best' option as this will find the next largest image. If this doesn't work for you, try playing around with the tolerance

TRDan6577 / AlbumAesthetics