Podcasting: Three podcast images | Tech Help for Churches

Podcasting: Three podcast images

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On today’s Tech Help for Churches, three podcast images

Once you get it all set up, podcasting can be really easy to do. Still, there are always tweaks, things to learn, and details that can add to your podcast. That’s what this episode is about.

[tweet “Your podcast can have 3 different images? Click here for what they are:”]

Most people know about album art. When you subscribe to a podcast in iTunes, in the Podcasts app, or now in the Google Play app, you see a picture. That’s the album art for the show as a whole. Apple says they want it 1200×1200 minimum, but recommend 3000×3000. That’s big.

Still, it’s doable. Where do you put it, though? How does Apple (as well as Google and others) know where it is? It’s in the RSS feed. When everything is set up correctly, there’s a tag in your RSS feed (the “shopping list” that tells your computer or device that you’ve got a new show) which tells program that downloads your podcast (and podcast directories, like iTunes) where your show cover art is. Most of the time, this gets set up at your podcast host or on your website, if you’re using Powerpress.

The next two types of art are episode art. Most podcasts don’t take advantage of this type of image. It’s possible to change the image with each episode. You don’t have to, but it’s possible.

In the case of a church podcast, this might be a series branding image. It might be a picture of a guest preacher. It might be any number of things, but there are two places it needs to go (and both are slightly different).

It used to be that the most common place to find episode pictures was in the ID3 tags of the mp3 file itself. iPods (and other portable devices without an internet connection) would read the episode art from the file itself. This file needs to be no more than 200kb.

The more common place to see the episode image today is (just like the show image) in the RSS feed itself.

With this information in mind, it is possible to change image for devices which read ID3 tags and not ones that read the RSS file.

Additionally, if you upload a show to YouTube, there’s another image that goes with that one. It shouldn’t be smaller than 1280×720.

Do you use different images for episodes vs. the show itself? How do you do it? For more information, watch the video above.

Join the conversation; call 1-877-763-3246, leave a comment below the video, or hit me up on Twitter (@PaulAlanClif)

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If you use the internet, social media, or new media to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

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