Most of the cover art I upload has been processed in some way. Sometimes it's pretty minimal—rotate, crop so the image only includes the page. Or conversion from a device color profile to sRGB.

Other times, though, it's more extensive. Apply a descreen (possibly only to parts—e.g., only to the photo, not the text). Or fiddling with gamma/levels/curves to, e.g., make a scanned CD (with it's reflective background) look at all right.

Or when using digital photographs (which capture foil much better than a flatbed scanner), you don't typically have a color profile, and have to adjust by eye or by using gray cards.

All of these result in only the final, compressed JPEG being uploaded.

The archive goal would be much better achieved, though, if it were also possible to upload the raw files. I think the minimum requirements would be:

• Allow various raw formats (DNG, CR2, XCF, Darktable xmp, etc.) to be uploaded.
• A checkbox to mark an upload as a raw file, which e.g., Picard could use to (optionally) not embed those files. It should default to checked for the raw-only formats, but needs to be checkable for normal formats too. Possible I took a few JPEGs and combined them to make the final image.

Nice to have:

• N:M relationship "raw source for" (or something like that), to link between raw file(s) and processed file(s)

If I can have a pony, too:

• For some of the formats, automate the export on the server. E.g., XCF could be flattened & exported to JPEG automatically.

See also: Forum thread