Musicbrainz artist image and information

Question

I have managed to get an artist's information using the following

http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/?query=artist:michael%20jackson

Which returns the MBID (or ID). The response here returns back a lot of information but not an image of the Artist.

So further reading leads me to CoverArt (https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Cover_Art) and https://archive.org/ and to get an image its led me to this link https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Cover_Art_Archive/API, which is targeting the release and not the Artist (the way i understand it, is, the release is the artwork of an album that an artist has done, but what i require is an image of the artist itself.

I'm not sure how to obtain the artist's image or if im going the wrong way about it as I've read a lot of links but i think im missing something here and wondered if anyone could advise? As far as i know and think i need the ID of the artist to start with but using the release entity doesnt return the image of an artist and ive substituted release with artist but that returns a 404.

Grandiose

Note that MusicBrainz usually only stores one link to an image on Wikimedia Commons (as well as links to Wikidata from where you can find more images on Commons). We do, however, also have a list of APIs that do understand MusicBrainz IDs, including fanart.tv which might have more images for some artists. – Eclectic

Answer 1

With that query you get the MBID. Then you can make this lookup: http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/f27ec8db-af05-4f36-916e-3d57f91ecf5e?inc=url-rels

Note the inc=url-rels part. More details and other possibilities are given in the MusicBrainz XML Web Service Documentation.

You can't get the urls from the search directly.

Diagnosis

The query you posted shows links to different sites and services and one image type link (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Jackson_in_1988.jpg) so should i use this and try and work out a way how to save it? I assume the same applies to other artists? Thanks – Grandiose

Yes, yes and yes. You can use one of the premade libraries to access to information in a convenient way: musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/… – Diagnosis