Think Outside the Box with the New Image Tag

Think outside the box with the new image tag.

This is the future of Podcasting, where we ponder what awaits the podcasters of today.

From the school of podcasting, here's Dave Jackson.

And from the Audacity to Podcast, here's Daniel J. Lewis.

Daniel, future of podcasting.

Episode number 62.

We are talking about the new image tag, and I know a little bit about it, so this will be great because I will get educated along with the audience.

I know from what I get, obviously it's new, a little more robust, and you can do other things.

I guess it's set up for multiple styles.

Is that the right word?

I don't think so, but multiple formats of images for multiple things.

So that's the fun thing, I guess, that we can just do more stuff.

So what can we do with this new tool?

Well, it can do many of those things, and this is so new of a tag.

It just came out as official in podcasting 2.0 spec that I don't think any hosting providers or publishing tools support it yet.

Yeah.

So I've actually hacked this into the Audacity to Podcasts feed so I could start playing with this right away.

But you did hit it correctly that this does allow for multiple styles of images that you could have or multiple purposes for images.

So let's go back to Dave.

What is the image that we're so used to putting in our podcasts?

Yeah, we're used to episode.

Well, there's two.

There's show images, and then episodic is usually the one that most people are thinking about, because you kind of set your show image and you're like, all right, that's done.

And then every time you do an episode, some people will do an episodic image.

And that's anywhere.

It's Square.

Anywhere from 1400 by 1400 up to 3000 by 3000.

Most people do JPEG, but you can do PNG.

And depending on who you talk to, some people say it still needs to be under 500 kilobytes, and other people are like, ah, that's old.

So.

But that's the one we think about.

Yeah.

And the same thing for the podcast level.

Podcast cover art, as we often call it, it's still square.

And you can count on one finger how many images you get to have as your podcast cover art.

Yeah, it's one.

In case you're missing your fingers, it's one.

So the new image tag, first of all, in its raw state, works just like the itunes image tag that we've had for 20 years now.

Happy birthday.

Podcasts and Apple Podcasts.

At its core, it can provide the same image.

And that's what we would recommend that you would do with that, is still put the same image in there.

Your same square image in JPEG or png, depending on which format, works better for your image, for the file size.

And you're providing your square podcast cover art.

But as with most things, podcasting 2.0, it not only replicates existing functionality, but builds on top of that and makes it better.

So with the new podcast image tag, and please don't confuse this with the previous tag, which was images plural, that's been deprecated.

So this is the new image image tag.

It has multiple features that allow you to provide more than only one image.

For example, you could provide multiple square images for your podcast.

There's nothing that says you can only provide one image.

You can use this tag multiple times.

But you can also provide images for different purposes and in different aspect ratios.

So your podcast cover art is a one to one aspect ratio, a perfect square.

It needs to be that to the pixel.

But you could provide an Image that is 16 by 9 that could be displayed in a video context.

It could be displayed as the hero image inside of an app.

Like that kind of shows off the branding near the top.

It could be a fancy banner sort of thing.

You could provide a tall image that displays in some other way.

You could provide other images.

Or the one that I really pushed hard for is, hey, let's not forget that some people, for some reason why want to crop podcast cover art to a circle.

And not all podcast cover art fits properly in a circle.

And so circular is another purpose.

And these things I'm talking about COVID banner, circular publisher, canvas, social and artwork, these are all different purposes that you can assign to these images.

And circular is one of those where you could say that this is the image that if it needs to be cropped to a circle, this is the image to use.

So you're providing these for different purposes.

And the purpose attribute is also not a completely defined static standard that you can only use one of these predefined things.

Because some apps may decide, well, we want this very specific aspect ratio from you.

Maybe it's a two to one aspect ratio, we'll say, so it's.

It's twice as wide as it is tall.

For that they might say, all right, put this in your podcast image tag and make sure it has this as the purpose.

And that purpose might be something proprietary, like true fans slash hero or overcast, slash, share or whatever they might come up with.

And that would be defining that this is the purpose of this image.

So then that app that is expecting that purpose tag knows what kind of image that should be and knows how to use it.

But what would happen if I go, here's the overcast image and it's whatever ratio.

And now my show is also in whatever cast magic or something like what are they going to do with that image?

Go dumb and just ignore it?

Basically, yeah.

That's the nice thing actually about this is that if you put something in there like an overcast specific image, other apps could use that if they wanted to.

Just like all of the apps right now are using the itunes image.

But if they wanted to use the overcast image, they could, or they could ask for something else proprietary or they could just say, hey, if you provide any image with this aspect ratio, what will use that?

And that's one of the other attributes that this tag can have is an aspect ratio attribute where you can put in whatever pixel dimension image, whatever purpose it is, but then assign an aspect ratio to it so that an app can see, it can scan through.

Maybe it's looking for only if you have a 16x9 image.

And if you do, it will use whatever that is in its special space designed for 16 by Nine, which is the widescreen movie format typically for Blu Rays, although now they're a lot more.

They're closer to I think 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio as cinematic.

But all of these different things where you could do like a 4 to 1 or anything like that.

So if an app had a particular need, they could even just say, hey, instead of giving it a custom purpose, just give it a custom aspect ratio.

And that would be more universal too.

Think of it like, choose the aspect ratios by default, like a 16 by nine, a one by one, a two by three, or whatever.

And the purpose would be if something about the image needs to be designed in a particular way to suit a particular purpose.

For example, Apple has sometimes said make sure there's nothing in the lower 30%.

And they've changed their standards around.

But you know, you might see something like that.

Or maybe they'll say, make sure it's the same color all the way around the edge or the same color across the bottom so it fades nicely.

Or there might be certain design guidelines that an app might provide.

And that would be a great moment to use the purpose attribute because then that image that you're designing is made for a specific purpose.

And Then as you ask, yeah, other apps could decide, hey, you know what, the way you're doing that, that's pretty cool.

We're going to use that same purpose as well.

Yeah, that's going to be the fun part is where now there is kind of one purpose.

This is for the episode artwork, this is for the show artwork.

And that's it.

Now if you wanted to, you could say, okay, we're going to use that image over here as well.

But it's still square, there's no flexibility there.

The good news is you can do a whole lot more with it.

Maybe the bad news is you can do.

It's going to be.

Because how do you then adapt it?

Because well, app A is using this and app B is doing this.

And so if I'm, I guess the media hosts are just going to have to have some sort of section where it's.

Because now again we've got to have it Aunt Cheryl friendly to work.

So you're going to have to have some sort of drop down or something to go, hey, here's my image drop down.

Here's the purpose, maybe drop down for ratio.

I'm not really sure.

But that's going to be the tricky part because with any kind of software, the more flexible you make it, that's great.

But you also then increased in some cases ease of use.

That's going to be one.

It's going to be interesting to see, like you said, which apps are going to embrace it, but also then which media hosts are going to go, oh well, here's, here's your dashboard for your images.

One easy thing for a media host to do is when you upload the image or the media, then it will scan it to see what is the aspect ratio and then automatically populate that.

That's the ideal way to do it.

So then that data is in the feed.

Because for a podcast app to determine the aspect ratio, it has to download the image, which could be wasting bandwidth.

Like imagine that you have 20 images, which you could do and if a podcast app had to download all of those just to check which one to use, that's wasting bandwidth, that's wasting processing power.

But instead what it could do is just scan inside the RSS feed to see which one of these either have the right aspect ratio or the right purpose tag and then use that instead of, of scanning everyone.

And then so the podcast hosting providers or publishing tools could automatically populate some of that.

And maybe like if they see you're uploading a wide image, maybe they even Recommend.

This looks like a wide image.

Ideally, you might want to use this purpose or this one, this one or this one.

But you could also enter your own custom thing.

Interesting.

And then you mentioned that it's media.

Yeah.

So what do you mean by that?

So this is where it also gets really cool.

I mean, sometimes when I say something is really cool, I kind of wonder how much people think Daniel is totally nerding out on this.

Where's the masking tape on his glasses?

Right now he's being a total nerd, thinking, this is so exciting.

Well, I do think this is exciting, not because of the technology, but because of what it enables people to do.

Right now, the itunes image tag can only be a PNG or a jpeg, a static still image.

Well, the new podcast image tag can be any type of media.

It doesn't have to be defined as only JPEG or png.

It could be an animated gif.

It could be some new modern format.

You could use this to provide a link to your Photoshop document, which right now that if you ever get featured inside of Apple podcasts or you get popular enough that they say, hey, we'd love to reach out to you and make your page look really nice.

And you see that with the really popular podcasts, like, you'll see this beautiful background, this nice hero image, all of this wonderful design, and all of these banners in different places.

The way that they do that is they ask for the design assets in Photoshop format or a layered format so it's editable and, and they can move things around as they need to and hide and reveal as they need to.

You could provide that through the image tag because it doesn't have to be a JPEG or a png.

It could be a Photoshop file.

So you could have in there Apple slash branding or whatever is your purpose.

And it links to your Photoshop document, allowing someone to then take that, adjust it to what they need to in their system, and then tie that in so you're providing it so they don't have to ask you for could.

Besides being an image, it could even be a video.

If you've ever been on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney, all of these places have this thing where sometimes as you're just moving the selector from show to show to show to movie to show to movie to movie to movie, you see a little bit animated of it.

That's one animation.

The other animation you might see sometimes is when you've clicked into a movie or a show or even just in the featured Section where they're showing off what's new or what's popular.

You'll see slightly animated backgrounds or some sequence or something going on.

That's something else.

So here are a few different things.

You could provide that kind of thing for your podcast, where maybe you have an animated version of your logo, or maybe you do a video show or you've got some video footage that you want people to be able to see, or maybe it's footage that somehow supports the topic you're talking about.

Like our friend Glenn with Horse Radio Network could have as a video image in the image tag.

He could have just some looping video showing him riding a horse or working with horses.

And it doesn't have to be big logo front and center.

It could be something that's supporting of the visual branding.

Like, really think of this new image tag as a way to provide visual branding assets to podcast apps or developers or the press even, or whoever wants to feature your podcast in some way.

I'm just hoping it's more like YouTube where it only starts animating when you put your mouse over it, because otherwise I'm seeing search results and it's just a blinking.

Stop the madness as everything is moving.

And, you know, that could be interesting.

And then I know Spotify has had an issue with porn on their video side of things.

That would be the other thing you'd have to be, well, I guess with any image, when you think about it, when we add more options for images.

Although, to be honest, aside from Spotify video, I haven't heard that much of naughty people doing naughty pictures in podcasting.

I think most of it's via the explicit tag and such.

That's the good news on that.

Yeah.

And there have always been things out there.

Like, there's.

I'm sure there's audio, porn and stuff like that, which, yeah, that's gonna be out there.

And I think, like, while you were mentioning the concern of the images and appropriateness of whatever's in them, that for a moment made me think, oh, maybe we need to add a new attribute to the image tag, something like adult image or something like that.

But then I realized, no, wait a minute, we already have an explicit tag, and there have been multiple proposals of ways to do something similar, but even better in podcasting 2.0.

So I think it would be better for a podcast to use that tag, and then the podcast app could potentially decide from that whether to trust the image.

But then again, like, right now, it's basically a binary.

Although in a way it's more a tertiary.

You kind of have three options.

But not many people talk about the third option.

The the options are it's either clean or it's explicit.

And explicit doesn't always mean dirty.

It could just mean there's profanity or it's a very mature subject.

I don't think it would be wise to say any podcast that is marked as explicit should not display any image.

But it goes back to Apple does have guidelines on what they allow in the images.

And they say no nudity, no Apple products in the images, no other trademarks.

You can't use the sports team's trademark in your podcast cover art, certain things like that.

So there are guidelines like that and I think then that could be handled on a case by case basis.

Yeah.

The other thing I want to go back to is do you think people like especially because it's going to have to, I guess in a way start with a media host because you said you hacked your feed.

So first of all, how did you hack your feed?

And do you think to me I'm trying to think of it from a media host standpoint and I don't have an immediate like oh, the dashboard would look like this come to my head.

It's like how do you do this and make it user friendly.

So what are your thoughts on implementation?

Well, the media host or the publishing tool can reveal this as an option just like they do with how do you upload your podcast cover art.

And in fact that could be the way they by default populate the first image tag.

Just to have it in there so it's fully cross compatible is when you upload your podcast cover art, it goes into the itunes image tag and it also goes into the podcast image tag.

For podcasting 2.0.

That's the easy one.

Then for additional ones, what the publishing tool would have to do is first it needs to support allowing you to upload multiple images.

That's a little bit more that's than they currently do, that whole thing of selecting however many images you want to do.

So I really think they should not limit it.

Right now most of the publishing tools limit how many categories you can choose to three for the images.

I do not think they should limit it at all.

They should allow you to upload as many images as you want.

Then when you upload, like I mentioned earlier, they should automatically read it to determine what is the format.

So they could populate that tag with the special mind type, which is a very nerdy thing.

And they could also automatically populate the aspect ratio so you don't have to think about that.

And then they could provide to you a list of the recommended purpose tags for that image or the purpose attributes, as well as letting you populate that manually if you needed to.

You'd be looking at basically drag and drop an image and either select from a dropdown or type it in manually.

That's pretty much as simple as it could be.

There is actually also an alt tag.

Like if you've ever worked with HTML images, the alt tag is for visually impaired or screen reading devices to know what is the image about.

For example, if you were putting in an image that's a chart, then the alt tag should describe what is on that chart, not just say a chart.

Right.

That should not be the alt tag.

That is a pointless alt tag chart.jpg yes, that's even worse.

Now, the way that I did this, I am still using PowerPress actually to generate my own podcast feed and I was playing around with moving to a different podcast hosting provider and then ultimately came back to PowerPress because I decided with my knowledge of programming and also the way the AI has made certain programming tools even easier.

I made a PowerPress extension.

So it builds on top of PowerPress and gives me the ability to put in whatever RSS tags that I want to.

So it's a dangerous feature.

Libsyn 4 has something similar to this where you could put in whatever code you wanted to.

It's very risky, but I put that in so that I could populate that with the code manually.

So I'm not uploading images directly, but I'm just putting in the code.

And that's the way that I've done it with PowerPress on my side.

And there's a chance I might be able to release that plugin for free.

I'm talking to Blubrry because I want to make sure that they're okay with my doing it and also want to respect their trademark.

So I. I'm not sure if I can call it like the PowerPress extension or something like that.

Right.

I want it to be findable for if people are looking for PowerPress but also not be confused for PowerPress or being confused for Blueberry, but you can look for that soon.

I might talk about that from the Audacity to podcast and then how do.

You test that right now when there are no apps using this feature yet?

So this is really cool.

Nathan Gathrite, who wrote this proposal and put all of this together, has a little demo that you can see some Kind of rough examples of how different images would look.

In the notes.

For this episode, we'll have a link to podcasting2.org where it has the spec for this image tag.

And then on that spec page, and we might have this also as a separate link, is a demo link where right now, as of July 16, you can upload a square image, a 3 by 4 image, and a 16 by 9 image.

And then it has kind of mock podcast players or different displays, and it will show you this is what the image would look like here, here, and here.

It's pretty simple, but still, it kind of lets you see, oh, okay.

That's what the image might look like if I uploaded that size of an image inside of a podcast app.

And that's a really handy tool.

And he'll probably expand that out to show other types of images in the future.

But it's a nice way that you can just play with it and see what would it kind of look like if you did that.

Yeah, because I think right now we're all kind of trying to picture what it would look like.

So the fact that there's a little mini demo that'll come in handy to kind of go, oh, okay, I get it now.

I mean, I remember when I first discovered podcasting and I'm understanding what an RSS feed, but it wasn't until I uploaded a file and then saw it come down in the software that I went, oh, now I get it.

So sometimes when you.

You see it in action, the light bulb stops flickering and actually comes on.

Yeah.

And some other ways that you could look at, not the support for this specific image, but just the potential for it is look at Apple podcasts either on the web or especially in the mobile app, because you'll get to see some cool ways that Apple Podcasts has more deeply integrated the image and into the whole user interface.

Right now if I look at the Audacity podcast, where I provide episode specific images, and the colors are usually different in the image and there's a different icon, but the title.

Even though Apple says, don't put the title in the episode artwork, I do for a specific read instance.

And hey, you know what?

That could actually be another purpose.

You could provide an image with the title and an image without the title, that could be something else as a purpose attribute.

But if you look at an episode as it's currently playing, you'll see the episode artwork fade into the background, and then the background looks at what is the color around the edge of that artwork, and it tries to match that color so it looks like you have this seamless image as the whole background for the play experience for that episode.

There could be that kind of thing.

Or if you start to browse the catalog inside of Apple Podcasts and you look at any of the featured podcasts, then you'll see some other kind of way that they're displaying the image in a really attractive way.

Just like if you look at Netflix, Disney plus or any of those things, you'll see not just a square image, and it's always the same square image.

You'll see different artwork laid out in different ways, depending on the size of your screen, where you're looking at it, at what point you pause all of this kind of stuff.

You.

And the really neat thing is that what this image tag provides is that opportunity for the podcast app experience to feel so much more polished and professional and refined.

Like a Netflix level experience for podcasts.

Interesting.

Yeah, we could definitely make things prettier with more image options.

I'm going to be interested to see who adopts what and how it gets used.

And that whole nine yards, this is one of those where, I don't know, almost like the standards project, if we could kind of all come up with like, okay, here are the first styles we're going to try to implement.

I don't know if that would shoot it in the foot or not, because half the fun of it is you can be as creative as you want, but if we all run like cats, then nothing's going to be compatible.

I don't know.

Maybe, maybe not.

We'll see.

But what are your thoughts on that?

Would that make sense or just let people go however they want to do it?

Well, it's a little bit of both.

Right now.

That purpose attribute has multiple.

They call them purpose tokens.

So there's artwork, social, canvas, banner, publisher, and circular right now.

So that's kind of the standard collection of them.

Those are the preset ones.

And there can also be all of those custom ones like Trufans, slash, Hero or anything else custom.

But what I think that could happen is as the community starts to use this, then the community might say, you know, enough of us are asking for this other particular use.

Let's add this as another recommended purpose token, like the with title versus without title or no text version or something like that.

Or icon.

Hey, there's another idea.

Maybe a way to provide some kind of icon for your podcast that has a transparent background and then you could provide it in a light mode and a dark mode.

That's what you can do with this.

So you can start to think like, how can you basically provide the assets so your podcast inside a podcast app will look beautiful, like a refined piece of art.

Yeah, very cool.

So you both you, Dave and you listening, here's the question I have for you and Dave, since you're here with me, you can answer this question.

And for you listening, you can answer this question to us.

Send it in a booster gram, maybe your answer to this.

But Dave, knowing the potential of what you could do with images, and I know you're not a designer, so you don't have to apologize or anything like that, but just knowing the potential of what you could do with images and the experiences you've seen in different apps, what would you as a podcaster and as a podcast consumer be most interested in doing and seeing with the new image tag?

That's a great question.

I think the 16 by 9.

Because often, like on Saturday morning I do ask the podcast coach.

It's streamed to YouTube.

So the first piece of artwork I replace is the 16 by 9 YouTube thumbnail.

And then I take that and go, okay, Canva, now squish it down to 3,000 by 3,000.

And there are times when I was like, oh, this looks so much better as the 16 by 9 that it did square.

And you've got to rearrange things.

So that would be kind of cool because number one, you could just one size fits all, maybe depending again how that would work.

But that would probably be the first thing I'd be like, oh, I can use this now in someplace besides YouTube and think that would probably be the first thing I would jump into.

How about you?

Well, I've already put my 16 by 9 image and a circular crop image of my own cover art.

So that's actually what I would recommend for anyone who wants to take advantage of this.

If you have the ability to.

That would be what I recommend as your first two things.

A 16x9 and a square, but a circle crop friendly.

So the way to make a circle crop, by the way, is just in your design app.

Just make a circle that fits perfectly inside of the square and then make sure anything important is visible inside that circle with a little bit of margin within or some padding within that circle like I've done with the Audacity to podcast.

And if you want to see how this image tag looks, check out the Audacity podcast, which by the way is back.

I've been publishing episodes, so if you want to hear me in another Podcast, then go check that out.

But check out that RSS feed if you want to see some examples of that.

And I realized I've got a video that I could put in there too.

So I'll be putting a video in there and some other stuff and make what you can play with it and start with the 16 by nine.

I think that's a great starting point, Dave.

Yeah, I think it's one of those things as we play with it.

Cause usually great ideas or just great products don't come about on the first swing.

Somebody does something like, ooh, that's really cool.

But what if it did this?

So I think the more we play with it, it's like, ooh, I've never thought of using it that way.

But what if we did this?

So that'll be fun to see as people start to experiment what different formats and such come our way.

Yeah.

And if you think of something else, then send that suggestion and booster gram.

And by the way, thanks to the late bloomer actor for the streaming satoshis.

We really appreciate that if you get value from the future of podcasting or you want to invest in the future of podcasting, not like the literal future, but just invest in us, then please send us a boostagram or stream some satoshis our way.

We'd really appreciate it.

And Dave and I split that.

He gets the majority of it, but we split it.

We do appreciate that so much.

And I think we've beat this horse.

I think we're good.

I now understand.

And it's podcast.

What's the tag again?

It's not images.

There's no s. Right.

It's just podcast image.

Tag is new.

And again, we'll have links to the demo.

We'll have the links to the things that Daniel was talking about podcasting 2.0.org.

We'll have links to that all out in the show notes.

But I said we put a pin in it.

That'll do it for episode 62.

Keep boosting and keep podcasting.