A new Discogs Image Archive

New Discogs Image Archive with SongKong 1.25

SongKong and Jaikoz both use the Cover Art Archive as their primary resource for artwork but a very important secondary resource has always been the cover art provided by Discogs.
 
In March 2014 Discogs changed their terms and conditions so that from now any user of  a third party application could access a maximum of 100 images in a 24 hour period, and was required to authenticate their access using OAuth. The reasoning behind this was to prevent websites hot limiting to Discogs images, I can certainly understand that issue but think that giving 3rd party applications access via an application key would have been a more sensible option. Forcing users to explicitly authorize their access was onerous but I went along with it and released SongKong 1.23 with the required authentication.

It then became apparent the 1000 images limit was also per application. So any application, regardless of how many users it has, can only access 1000 images per day. This made it pointless for each customer to individually authenticate their access so I released SongKong 1.24 and this removed the requirement for customer authentication. But we still had a significant problem - a limitation of 1000 images per users was not too bad, but a limitation over the complete customer base of SongKong made use of Discogs cover art unsustainable. And of course the problems are even worse for Jaikoz with its larger customer base.

The solution was to cache the images provided by Discogs so any image only has to be looked up once from Discogs, then additional customers requesting the same image can use the cached image. Of course this requires the cached images to be available from a central server and I considered setting up my own Discogs Image Archive but this takes some effort and some time to build up the size of the archive. Luckily such a service has just been launched courtesy of the One Music Api, this archive doesn't yet contain all the images provided by Discogs but is growing every day and already provides good coverage. 

Today I release SongKong 1.25 with support for the One Music Api Image Endpoint. Within a week I expect to have a new release of Jaikoz with the same support