The cover art relationship has been deprecated for the last two and a half years (STYLE-158), but still can't be removed from the database because it's still in use. I think we should decide on a way to finally clear out the relationships so the relationship type can finally be removed.

I see three main options:

• Use a bot to simply remove the relationships.
• Use a bot to add the image to the CAA and then remove the relationship.
• Continue manually removing the relationships.

I think continuing to manually remove the relationships would be a stupid idea. In the past year, we've removed 368 relationships, so approximately one per day. We still have 4085 relationships left. At the current rate, it will take another 11 years.

As for the other two options, I think adding the images to the CAA first would be the best option. It means that the cover art won't change, it will just be stored in a different place. There is the possibility that some of the covers are incorrect, but that simply means the wrong image has already been added - it will continue being just as wrong as it already is until someone fixes it.

Removing the relationships without adding the images to the CAA would be easier, but would mean losing cover art and in some cases we could end up losing it forever (the URL will of course be in the edit history, but we can't guarantee that the URL will still work in the future).