Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I used to have images show up for most of the books on my shelves but several of the images have since gone away. Any suggestions on how to add them back?

Search for them on Amazon? http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show_g...

Also, if you own a basic scanner, and you own or are currently in possession of the edition of the book for which you wish to post an image, you can do the following: Scan the cover of the book, save the document image that you just created to a file on your computer, crop the image to excise any shadows, shrink the image to about 50% of its original size, and save the changes. Thereafter, you can click "edit book" on the Goodreads web page on which the relevant book appears, then click "browse" on the upper right of the resulting page, click the image you saved so that its document name it appears in the box next to "browse," and then click upload.

You should be careful about using Amazon or Barnes & Noble images for uploading. Frequently, they only post images of the most recent edition of a book, which sometimes does not match the ISBN number--or even the same publisher--of the edition or printing that is already on Goodreads or that you had read. For very recent editions, Amazon or B&N is fine. For older editions or printings, the web site librarything.com has lots of user-uploaded images [sometimes hundreds of different covers for popular books in the public domain] that are easy to copy and paste. Alibris.com, which specializes in used books, also has multiple covers posted on its site.

Hope this is of some help.

There are other good sources online as well. I find doing an image search by title (or title and author if the title is insufficiently unique) very useful.

I've been scanning about a dozen books each weekend and loading the images here. I have a shelf called 'need-image' and it's been bouncing between 12-30 books as I try to keep up with putting my collection in.

I've had to scan a lot of my books, but some of them are just too big for my scanner...and some are hardbacks missing their dustjackets. The idea of searching more widely online sounds a good one :).

Thanks for this. I'd been going round and round to find out where to do this! Now done.

Did you ever get an answer to your question? I too had images for books displayed that went away. Also author images that I have uploaded have disappeared. I just want to know if there's a glitch in the GoodReads system or if the problem is with my computer. Thanks.

Hi Karl,

Do you know which author? Sometimes authors have multiple profiles, which can be confusing.

Hi Otis,

Thanks for responding. As far as I can tell, of all the authors I've uploaded photographs for, mysteriously the photographs have disappeared. Although when I go in to edit their profiles a "Delete Photograph" message is there rather than an "Upload Photograph" message which would indicate that a photo is linked somewhere in the system. Among the authors I've recently updated profiles for (and uploaded photos for) are : L.P. Hartley, Michael Frayn, Stephen J. Pyne, & Peter Parnell. I also am not seeing book covers where I did before. I even tried signing in on another browser thinking I may have somehow messed myself up. Same phenomenon. If you wouldn't mind checking out a couple of the authors that I've mentioned and letting me know what you see I'd appreciate it. Thanks so much.

I see L.P. Hartley, L. P Hartley, and L P Hartley (but not L. P. Hartley, which is what I would normalize on). The first one has a photo and basic info, the other two don't have anything.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

ye gads, but Mr Hartley is a mess. Poor chap.

Indeed. I tried to clean it up, but various variations on his name turn up even after I think I've tried them all. Nobody has said anything about pictures for any of the other authors I've mentioned. If everyone else can see photos (except perhaps Wendy at the top of this thread) then apparently I've done something to prevent them appearing when I log on. They were around for weeks and weeks but then one day they, along with many (but not all) covers I used to see, simply disappeared. A frustrating mystery.

Karl,

I can see author images for Michael Frayn, Stephen J. Pyne, & Peter Parnell.

Thanks Jessica,

That answers my question. Now if I could only figure out why I can't see them . . .

Are you using IE, Firefox, Safari, or . . . ?

Karl,

Can you send the specific url you are looking at when you can't see them?

I'm having the same problem with both IE & Firefox. I even reinstalled Firefox yesterday but to no avail.

Otis,

It's just about every page I look at. The weird thing is that sometimes I see a couple of the book covers on any author's page, sometimes none. When I choose to see my books-to-read as covers, only one out of 29 appears. Anyway, here are a few url's that I know have author/cover images, because I uploaded them, but that do not display for me:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Karl

I must admit I am at a loss to explain this, because those work for me. Lets try this - can you send in the source of a page that isn't working to support_at_goodreads.com? To save the source, go to 'file' => 'save as'.

Well, I just noticed that book cover images keep disappearing on Amazon's site so I'm wondering if that might be part of the problem.

Just went to Amazon to download a book cover image that I saw there within the past couple of days, in order to get it on Goodreads, to replace the one I scanned but could not edit properly, and it's now blank/gone. I’ll check periodically and see if it returns.

P.S. At the time I scanned the cover, it also was not at Amazon, or anywhere that I could find.