New feature: anime 'cover' images

Here at Anime-Planet we've always tried to focus on only putting up high quality, unique information, such as hand-written synopses and personally-taken screenshots for every series - this is one thing that helps distinguish AP from other sites.

But we also know that it's hard to use the site as a primary resource if entries are blank, so we're working on a few projects to fix that.

Starting today, all blank anime, when possible, will have a 'cover' image - such as a promotional movie poster, an official DVD cover, etc. You can click the cover just like a main image if screenshots are up, to see a bigger-sized version. HERE'S AN EXAMPLE. Covers go away once screenshots are added. While it seems like a small feature, this ended up being a fairly time-consuming feature to add and test.

A team of volunteers and myself added these images over the last few days - there were certain anime that didn't have an acceptable cover image, such as DVD specials (promo shots aren't released for the specials themselves), music videos, certain older/obscure titles, etc. But most do now have covers.

If you'd like to look at the list of anime without cover images, go to the browse anime page, click 'advanced', and then click the new 'needs cover' button on the right. You can still use the 'no images' button instead to see which anime don't have screenshots.

While putting up cover images breaks our 'only put up high quality/personally done info' rule, the goal is still that eventually we'd have screenshots up for each of these. Hopefully this is a good, temporary step to make sure that you can tell what an anime will be like while using AP.

There are parallel efforts going on to get more people trained on submitting screenshots, and even an effort regarding synopses, so stay tuned for those. In the meantime I personally will try to focus on adding full entries for series without covers (as ideally all titles will have EITHER screenshots OR a cover image) and hopefully the screenshot trainees can too!

I'd like to thank the following volunteers for dropping everything to help shape the guidelines and add images in only a few days' time:

Btbowler
CommanderKarasu
Garyuu
greyweather
kawainu
Naga
zetsuboushita

Hope you enjoy the feature, and as always, if you enjoy it or the site, please consider making a donation - all donations go straight into site hosting costs and new features.

Note: currently these images are only showing up on the entry pages themselves - it'll be a relatively quick task to get them showing up in other places too, like recommendations and the popular anime images. This is coming soon in the next day or two :)

Good work, that's a nice improvement. :)

I think this is a great new feature. It makes the site look way more complete and filled. Good job to the coders, tinkerers, Sothis and the volunteers!

That's awsome I hate when the new animes come out and have no pictures on them.

Good stuff Sothis and team, keep it up. Sounds like a pretty neat feature. Unfortunately I'm too busy to really help out with much at the moment.

Aces!

This is awesome! I think this will definitely help when I've added an anime to watch, but don't remember it. Kudos to the team as always fantastic work.

I'd like to help with adding covers. How can I do it?

I was glad to have been able to help this wonderful site, and am glad i had the chance to assist this wonderful site. Keep up the good work.

Good thing that you people finally work on it, because I've ran into some animes that are pretty new, but already aired and they're still lacking pictures.

And I don't think there's any anime that I've watched before checking out what it looks like. I always want to make sure that I can stand that drawing style for 12 episodes or more.

I think this is a great idea. Now there won't be so many pages that are completely blank

Will you be doing this with Manga as well? That would be awesome if you would.

err, not sure if you've looked at the manga database, but we already put up an official volume cover with every single manga (except one shots, which don't have covers). that's how we've done it since day 1, there's no such thing as screenshots with them

... I honestly don't know what I was thinking Sothis... I'll go stand in the corner now. v_v

The confusion is actually understandable, because there are quite a few oneshots in the db, thus one does encounter quite a few "no image" entries. In lieu of cover pics for these, I think it would be good to have some standard pic that says "ONE SHOT" on it.

the percentage of one shots to normal is extremely low

True, but even just 1% of 13,000 is still a lot. (13,000 being based on the "everythingwatched" acct, which has just shy of 11k "read" and just shy of 2k "reading" manga.)


I just did some reasearch here;
The "one shot" tag lists 1,780 mangas. Some of those do actually have a pic cropped from a page of the manga, but many don't.

Applying the "browse->no images" search to manga gets in 1,778 results.
"No images" + "one shot"= 841 results. Many of the remaining ~900 or so results have no tags at all, approximately 100 of those ~900 have "webcomic" tags.

Meanwhile, the "no images" search when applied to anime gets 2397 results. Which means that when looking at percentages, the anime had nearly 50% "no images" (again, based on the everythingwatched acct, which has about 5k anime marked), while manga has about 13% "no images". When looking at raw numbers though, there are nearly as many manga entries without images as there are animes with no images or just cover images.

'no images' is based on screenshots, not covers - anything with a cover will show up under 'no images'

anyways, this is an announcement thread for anime and he asked for something that exists for manga, so let's keep the discussion to the new feature or questions about it :)