I've made some mockups of ways to show this information:

http://musicbrainz.music.mcgill.ca/~alastair/collection1.html
http://musicbrainz.music.mcgill.ca/~alastair/collection2.html

I'm looking for votes on what layout looks better. I'm thinking that both might be useful, for instance, showing the full images by default, but being able to switch to the list for other operations such as delete, move (MBS-1806).

First one for me. I wouldn't want to use the second one at all.

First one for me too.

I like 1st one (but with smaller icons would be better for me) and 2nd one very nice seeing big covers.
Maybe like you say we would have a switcher : « text | icons | covers »
where text is our current list,
icons is your 1st one with smaller pics (32×32px for instance) and
covers is your 2nd one.

Wow, OK. The votes have spoken. I much prefer 2, but will look at getting 1 going first, instead. I'll look at adding 2 as an extra option in the future. I think the options should just be icons | covers. There's no reason to keep text around.

+1 for "do #1 now, add a switcher later to have both"

I'd like some feedback on how to approach this issue. The sidebar currently uses javascript to load the image (root/components/common-macros.tt display_artwork), and tries the 250 thumb, full size, and finally any given fallback (e.g. from asin).

Is it important to have the same level of fallback on a list here, or can we just assume the 250 thumb will be available (maybe with a single layer of fallback to add a "image not here" image)? (Specifically looking for feedback from Warp, who did the sidebar)

Any cover art display code should re-use our existing cover art display code. Do not re-invent the wheel with different fallbacks and such – if the existing macro isn't good enough for your use-case, improve the macro instead, so we get the benefits elsewhere as well.

So use the "display_artwork" macro from root/components/common-macros.tt

Potentially conflicting changes alert: I have a branch in beta at present that makes us use the 500px images (MBS-4674). Shouldn't actually matter, but it might make master conflict by next Monday if you need to do any improvements to that code.

This failed code review – http://codereview.musicbrainz.org/r/2149/