Getting a good identification
An identification is only ever as good as what the camera handed over. Four things are worth photographing, three of them have another side, and one of the four is the one nearly everybody leaves out.
Two records can share a sleeve, a title and a catalogue number and still be pressed twenty years apart in different countries, for very different money. What separates them is almost never the artwork — it is the small print and the codes. These are the four places they live.
The front gets you into the right neighbourhood. The back is the one that pins down the house — catalogue number, rights and licensing lines, track times, and usually the barcode.
Catalogue number, rights and licensing lines, the tiny text around the rim. A surprising amount of the answer is printed here — and side two carries its own.
The smooth ring between the last groove and the label, where the matrix and run-out codes are etched or stamped. This is the shot that makes a match specific — and each side has a different code.
If there is one. Usually on the back of the sleeve or on a sticker. When a record has a barcode, this single shot does more than the other three combined.
Three of those four have another side, and it is not a duplicate of the first. This is the most common way a set of photos comes up short: everything above was shot, and only ever once.
| The other side | What is on it that isn't on the first | Worth shooting |
|---|---|---|
| Back of the sleeve | Catalogue number, label and distributor lines, printer or plant credits, track times, and the barcode if there is one. The front is artwork; the back is paperwork. | Always. If you shoot one face of the sleeve, make it this one. |
| Side two's label | Its own catalogue number or side suffix, and occasionally a different rights line or a variant nobody would guess from side one. | Usually. It is one turn of the wrist. |
| Side two's dead wax | A different matrix code entirely. The two sides are cut separately and stamped separately, and it is common for only one of them to be decisive. | Whenever the title has a lot of pressings. |
| Spine, inner sleeve, insert | The spine repeats the catalogue number in a different typesetting; inners and inserts carry their own printed codes and are often the thing that got swapped between pressings. | If they exist and carry print. |
A gatefold, a double LP or a box set multiplies all of this — more labels, more run-outs, more printed panels.
A barcode is close to an exact address. Where the sleeve narrows a record down to a few dozen possibilities and the dead wax to a handful, a barcode frequently lands on one — and it is the easiest of the four shots to take, because it is flat, printed, and well lit by design.
It is also the shot people skip, because it does not look like part of the record. If the sleeve, a sticker or the shrink has a barcode on it, get it in frame.
The catch is that plenty of records simply do not have one. Barcodes only became normal on records through the 1980s, so anything older typically has nothing to photograph — and on those, the dead wax carries the whole load. That is the honest split: if there is a barcode it is the most valuable shot you can take; if there is not, the run-out is.
If the barcode or the matrix is easier to read with your own eyes than through a lens — reflections, tight etching, a curved sticker — there are fields on the scan form for both. Typing what you can actually see beats photographing something the camera cannot resolve.
Sometimes — and it depends entirely on how contested the record is. When a title has only a few plausible pressings, extra photos change essentially nothing: the answer was already narrow, and more angles of the same sleeve add no new information.
When a title has many competing pressings, the picture changes. Across our own scans, records with a genuinely contested field were identified noticeably more often when there were more than half a dozen photos than when there were fewer. That is a direction, not a promise — the numbers behind it come from modest samples, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
The practical version: take the four shots. Then add photos only where there is something new to see — the second side's label and run-out, a sticker, a stamp on the sleeve, a spine, an insert, a pressing plant mark. Six photos of the same sleeve from six angles is six copies of one shot.
| What people worry about | What we measured | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Megapixels | A 3000×3000 photo and a 64×64 one are handed to the model on the same budget. A bigger file does not buy a closer look; it buys a longer upload. | Fill the frame with the thing you want read. Getting close is what makes small text legible — not resolution. |
| Which way up it is | Rotated and unrotated photos scored identically in a like-for-like test — a dead heat, with no measurable edge either way. | Nothing. Do not spend time straightening photos before uploading. |
| Photo count costing you money | The number of photos has effectively no relationship to what a scan costs. | Do not ration photos to save money. Do ration them to save time — see the case below. |
These are the three that get raised most often, and all three are dead ends. What is left — filling the frame, and the barcode — is where the effort actually pays.
One scan arrived with 13 photos, 20 megapixels each, 88 megabytes in total. It was identified correctly — and it would have been identified correctly with a fraction of that. A barcode had already narrowed the field to almost nothing before the extra photos were even looked at.
What all that material did buy was a wait: the same record ran more than twice as long as a leaner set of photos of it. Effort spent past the point where the answer is settled is not insurance. It is queueing.
Every measurement above says the limiting factor is what is in the frame, not what took the photo. No lighting rig, no scanner, no tripod.
The simplest test there is: if you can read the catalogue number on your own screen after taking the photo, it can be read. If you have to squint, move in and shoot it again.
Etched and stamped codes have no ink in them — they are visible only because they catch light differently from the surface around them. Angle the record until the etching flashes, then shoot from there. Straight-on and evenly lit is the one setup where a run-out disappears completely.
A record is a mirror. Direct flash puts a white disc exactly where the writing is. Ordinary indoor light, with the bright source off to one side, reads better than anything the flash will do.
The flip is the cheapest extra material you will ever gather — the record is already in your hand and the light is already set. Doing it at the time costs seconds; going back for it later means finding the record again.
A promo stamp, a sticker, an obi, an unusual sleeve construction, a hand-written mark — anything out of the ordinary is more likely to be identifying than another view of the front cover.
Shoot it as it is first — shrink wrap, hype stickers and price labels are themselves evidence of which pressing you have, and they are gone the moment you open it. Then, if you do open it, take the label and dead wax shots afterwards.
You can paste a listing URL instead of taking photos at all, and the seller's own images get used. It is worth opening the listing first to see whether they photographed the label and the run-out — if they only shot the sleeve, there is a limit to what anyone can conclude, and that limit is worth knowing before you bid.
An unreadable matrix shot invites a confident-looking reading of characters that are not there. If a shot did not come out, retake it or leave it out — a gap is honest, a misread is not.
If the identification comes back with a question — a specific letter in the run-out, a line of text on the label — that question is the one look that settles it. One good photo of exactly that thing does more than twenty of everything else.