Random member uploaded covers replacing my original selections

Where are you seeing the wrong covers? In your catalogue, the Work page, Tag pages, etc?

>3 Nightmusic: Oh, that's a weird one!

I was checking because I was hella confused/thought something went wrong when tag pages filtered to "my books" showed the most popular cover instead of mine.

>1 Nightmusic: Some major questions:
1) Does anyone else have access to your account?
2) have you added Librarything to the Browser Policy Exceptions to allow all covers to show?
3) Have you checked the edit history to see if you can find where the change happened?
4) PLEASE give at least 2 examples for the admin to research.

I admit I can't find it, but isn't there a setting to always show the most common member-uploaded cover on your books?

>7 Nightmusic: Covers aren't part of the CK history fields. It won't be listed there.
If you have a book you think the cover has changed, you can click into edit book and see edit history. That will tell you if the cover was changed manually by someone else.
Which if it has, you can have a little more detail for the admin to research.

If it is an automated process, it won't show, but might suggest you still have an Amazon cover selected.

If you leave the siggested member cover for ISBN, and do not specifically select it, it can change if a different cover becomes more popular for that ISBN.

>12 Nightmusic: https://www.librarything.com/stats/Nightmusic/covers

You can see which covers are "best guess by ISBN" in Charts & Graphs. Click on the first pie chart to open the details table, then you can click on the Best Guess subset to see them in your catalogue.

It makes me wonder how I can proactively confirm a best-guess cover, I guess I need to select a different one, then the right one?

>12 Nightmusic: In Charts and Graphs you can see what books have covers you have chosen, and which have best guess covers.

You can also set your account not to allow Amazon covers.

>13 keristars: You can embiggify the cover on the work page and click “Confirm this cover” at the top of the window.

>15 Charon07: thanks! I was embiggening the selected cover in the list, not the one at the top.

>11 MarthaJeanne: If you leave the siggested member cover for ISBN, and do not specifically select it, it can change if a different cover becomes more popular for that ISBN.

Ohhhhhh, that's an interesting tidbit. Thanks!

I'd note that most popular member-uploaded cover for ISBN does not change all that often, certainly not to the extent to explain issues as described in >1 Nightmusic: (It is, though, good practice to confirm those automatically assigned when you enter a book)

>19 Nightmusic: Normally, nothing that included your input is changed without you changing it. Automatically assigned covers is not among those, though. To be so, one has to either make sure to confirm when entering new books or periodically confirm 'best guess' covers from charts and graphs.

I have no ideas how something of the scale you describe could happen. Not even Amazon changes covers at that pace. Let's hope developers will be able to tell you more.

I need specifics. Can you point me to books/works that are a problem for you?

I'm investigating this. No other user should be able to EVER change the covers on your books, so I'm taking this very seriously. I don't want to speculate until I have a good indication as to the cause, so give me a little time to run through the details.

>24 conceptDawg:

I think this is ID confusion in your system. But also note the last time a member said this, they had Amazon covers turned off and they were getting member covers as the best possible cover for their ISBNs.

>26 timspalding: I don't think so...but continuing to investigate before making a statement.

@Nightmusic Have you had any more of your covers change out from under you since posting this?

>28 conceptDawg:

Aren't all cover changes recorded in the history log now?

>31 Nightmusic:

Yes. Covers you changed should not change unless you change them. I don't think any have, but @conceptdawg is the one working on this.

@Nightmusic: Normally I wouldn't mention book IDs for a private library like yours but since you've already listed them above I'll continue referring to them here for ease of conversation and clarity.

Your book and catalog changes are fully tracked on every book and field (we call this "atomic" and you do have 745 cover "actions" on record). This recent book was added 2025‑11‑23 — entirely in the "atomic era" when we introduced the change-tracking features, so no pre‑atomic blind spots exist for it. Every change to it: recorded. So every path that could set a cover would have left a ledger entry, the display would have shown it, and there are none related to the cover. You never set, changed, or cleared a cover on this book.

Questions I asked in the audit:
- "Is there evidence in the atomic ledger that the user changed this cover?" → definitively no. Zero cover actions, and for this atomic user that's a complete record. All possible entries into the cover-change code have been audited by me (and by automated systems) multiple times now.

- "Is it an Amazon/ISBN cover that changes on its own?" → Yes. With no user-defined custom cover it falls through to the best‑guess‑by‑ISBN branch. That's LT's auto‑selected "best" cover for the ISBN/work — it legitimately changes as member uploads for that ISBN come and go. It is not a member‑pinned image, so there's no stored record when it visually changes...that's up to amazon.

The most recent book mentioned has had no edit of any kind since 2025‑11‑23.
So the cover change you noticed since this started cannot be a user edit or any stored mutation, it's ISBN/ASIN selection of the best cover. All books you mention have this exact pattern the audit documented with the other books also: (300735088 / 301622034 / 300688071 / 306755968).

Book 300964958 and the 3 originally-cited books all have no custom cover set. They render best-guess-by-ISBN (amazon covers, which can change). The "repaired" book 306755968 correctly shows a custom cover has been set.

---
Confidence: I'm at 100% that these haven't been changed out from under you. They aren't assigned a custom cover at all so they are doing ISBN changes via amazon cover sources (even if you didn't add those via amazon we still use amazon covers for those ISBNs if you haven't selected a custom cover).

Your catalog cover: the majority are already set to custom covers and won't change but: 2 ISBN, 6 ASIN still exist.

>35 Nightmusic: If you select one of the Amazon covers, yes it could change.
If you select a Member Cover, then it will never change.
You still have 8 covers that are amazon covers.

ETA: sorry, you have 4 books without custom covers. I misread my data (4 of them were for books you have since deleted)

So if I do not select a custom cover, then I'm using a changeable amazon cover without realizing it.

If you do not select a custom cover, your cover may change over time. Sometimes this will be because the Amazon cover changes. But if the book has no Amazon cover, or you have Amazon covers turned off, it uses the custom cover that seems best for the ISBN. This may change over time, as we seek to use the best, highest-quality and most popular cover for a given ISBN.

Using this as an example of a book with many variants and resolutions
https://www.librarything.com/work/5235431/book/308649836
how do you know which cover you have chosen and whether it will change or not? or if it is an amazon "most popular" choice

>39 JonathonL88: Amazon covers are not stable, they depend entirely on whether Amazon is carrying those books or not at any given moment and what cover they assign to ISBN/ASIN at any given moment. That is a given.

LT.hosted covers will not disappear, but if you haven't confirmed the one automatically assigned for your ISBN, they can change once enough people use a different one and that becomes the most used one. This does not happen very often in my experience, but over a longer period of time, it will affect at least some books.

Charts and graphs offers a very useful breakdown of covers to see which of your covers are from where and, among LT hosted ones, which ones have not been confirmed, but merely automatically assigned.

ETA: For individual books, opening a cover from work page, gives you all the info, and if from LT, the 'confirm' button

>40 SandraArdnas: If you display details of a book, then there should be some indication of the source of the cover (as well as being able to select, sort and export that information)

>38 Nightmusic: If there's an LT-hosted cover associated with ISBN, it will assign that. If LT has none associated with it at all, you get default cover.

It occurred to me that, if you turned Amazon covers off and back on, that could be why many changed. When off, you'd get whatever LT associates with ISBN, but when you turn it back on, I assume it switched to Amazon one when that is the most popular one for ISBN, which is the majority of cases since most people take whatever is assigned and never look back. LT cover having more uses than Amazon, and thus winning overall as the most used, is not very common

>41 JonathonL88: I'm not sure what you mean since it's not possible to export single book data anyway (unless you go through export and choose a single book, but from work page, there's no way to export any of it). For sorting and searching, that's where Charts and Graphs comes in. Go to https://www.librarything.com/stats/JonathonL88/covers and you can open any section of the graph in your catalogue and sort and search from there e.g. your covers from Amazon based on ASIN https://www.librarything.com/catalog/JonathonL88?deepsearch=coverstats::amazonas...;

>39 JonathonL88: how do you know which cover you have chosen
On the covers page, the cover assigned to your book is highlighted with a thick border. If you click the magnifying glass icon on the bottom right of the image, the details will say "using this cover" OR ask if you want to use it instead.

whether it will change or not? or if it is an amazon "most popular" choice

To check if it's a popular choice cover automatically assigned, open the cover image at the top of the covers page, or any of the work pages really. If it asks you to confirm the choice, it is using the calculated best.

https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/covers is a more efficient way to find all the best-guess covers instead of one at a time.

Clicking on the cover source chart will expand it with a table of details and you can click each group to see them in your catalogue. For example, best-guess member uploaded:

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/MEMBERNAME?deepsearch=coverstats::isbncusto...