Artist Biography photos - how are they queried in the search engines

[hiccup]

Nice skin ;-)
Steven is probably the only person that can shed some more light on this.
Maybe your input is helpful to improve things for specific requirements of some users, if they realistically can be improved upon.

[frankz]

And maybe, if Steven could allow configuring the Artist Photos search queries in Preferences, to customize them making them as specific as I want.

That'd be fun.  Like I could add "supermodel," and then my pictures would be all my favorite bands posing with supermodels!  

Seriously, though, since last.fm took away the API for it, the only 100 reliable solution for artist photos is firing up a search engine on your own and pasting whatever good images you find into your own instance when the auto retrieval fails.  Last.fm still provides the biographies with no problem, which is why they're mostly always right.

Ban the ones you don't like, save the ones you do like, manually search when the automatic method won't bring anything relevant.  No one said there's no work in collecting.  

[hiccup]

Pipe dream, surely not realistic at the current state of affairs:
Wouldn't it be great if the image of an artist would match the period a song/album was released.

[phred]

Wouldn't it be great if the image of an artist would match the period a song/album was released.

Now -that- would be a nice feature.

[The Incredible Boom Boom]

In my case, all these music files are always properly tagged (Album, Artist, Genre, Year, everything).
Therefore the criteria for the search should be ok (the bio is always correct). But still I frequently get irrelevant Artist photos, and in some cases totally irrelevant.
I've tried myself all possible queries I could think in various search engines, and these irrelevant photos are never displayed.

Regarding Bing, it's "similar images" results are usually terrible, so that's probably why you're seeing other metal bands.

[darkred]

Nice skin ;-) Steven is probably the only person that can shed some more light on this.
Maybe your input is helpful to improve things for specific requirements of some users, if they realistically can be improved upon.
...
Wouldn't it be great if the image of an artist would match the period a song/album was released.

I wish he replies, and I'd be glad if my input would help in improving MB.
And, that would be awesome.

since last.fm took away the API for it, the only 100 reliable solution for artist photos is firing up a search engine on your own and pasting whatever good images you find into your own instance when the auto retrieval fails.  Last.fm still provides the biographies with no problem, which is why they're mostly always right.

Ban the ones you don't like, save the ones you do like, manually search when the automatic method won't bring anything relevant.  No one said there's no work in collecting.  

The functionality you describe (paste/save and ban) is of the "Artist Pictures" element.

I've been using the "Now playing bar" | "Artist Biography"  instead,
and that's because unfortunately, "Artist Pictures" + "Artist Biography" cannot be combined and fit together horizontally in the 'main panel',
and because it has a bug, which I reported (+made a suggestion) here .

[darkred]

Seriously, though, since last.fm took away the API for it, the only 100 reliable solution for artist photos is firing up a search engine on your own and pasting whatever good images you find into your own instance when the auto retrieval fails.  Last.fm still provides the biographies with no problem, which is why they're mostly always right.

Ban the ones you don't like, save the ones you do like, manually search when the automatic method won't bring anything relevant.  No one said there's no work in collecting.  

The bug I reported, "'Now playing bar' panel | Artist Photo - wrong context menu at launch", has been fixed in latest beta, 3.4.7743 .

frankz, I never said that want everything to be made "automatically", without me doing anything. On the contrary, I want to be able to keep my collection as organized as possible.

Your method ( "Paste/Save Artist Picture" and "Ban Picture") is a very useful workaround, in order to hide irrelevant photos:
I didn't know this functionality was available due to the bug I mentioned (that context menu on the artist photo in the "now playing bar" was never available in my case).
Thanks for the help, and everyone for the replies.