Add cover images to your work items

[#1]

We’re excited to announce a highly requested feature: the ability to add cover images to your work items. This will start rolling out in January 2026.

What’s changing

Now you can personalize your work items by adding a cover image that reflects your team’s identity, highlights important work, or simply adds a bit of fun and visual flair to your workspace. Whether it’s your team logo, a product icon, or a memorable photo, cover images help make your boards and work items more engaging and easier to scan.

How does it work?

• Add a cover image to any work item from More actions (…) in the work item, or from the More actions (…) menu on a card in the board view.
• Once added, your cover image will appear on both the board card and at the top of the work item itself.

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Our goal is to make managing projects in Jira a seamless and enjoyable experience. Stay tuned for more updates, and let us know your feedback.

— The Jira Product Team

[Yatish Madhav]

This is awesome - thanks @Sahibi Miranshah ! Looking forward to this on our instance!

Random question, is Trello going to be decommisstioned at some point? :)

Thanks

Yatish

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @Sahibi Miranshah I took the liberty of looking up the related suggestions in JAC to see if it actually is a "highly requested feature":

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-91115 > 27 votes
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-85946 > 0 votes

I have the same question as @Yatish Madhav .

[Brita Moorus]

That's a cute new feature! ✨

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Sahibi Miranshah 

Thank you for this information.  I have a couple of questions about this feature:

1. What can you disclose about the team's performance testing of this feature?
2. Can it be completely disabled at a Jira site and / or space level?

I recall when such cover images were added to Team-managed spaces, performance issues during scrolling / page draw led to challenges.  Here is an example defect for that symptom, which was timed-out rather than fixed: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-85601

Kind regards,
Bill

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

@Sahibi Miranshah , cute feature.  I'm on release tracks, how did this slip into my production environment without it being in the release notes?  This is very annoying to only find out about these features via articles.

[Rick Westbrock]

I am with you @Dave Mathijs, there are so many JAC tickets with hundreds of votes that this seems like sub-optimal use of resources. There seems to be a pattern of this where features nearly nobody wants are built at the expense of filling feature gaps and fixing bugs that are actually important (based on vote counts).

[lauram]

How do we stop this feature adding a default image automatically on the work item? It's not useful to pull through images based on what is in the description as this could be completely unrelated and not suitable to the header. I now have to manually clear every header image.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Sahibi Miranshah and the Atlassian Team,

Several people have asked specific questions about this new feature.  Please see the above comments for context.

What is the team doing to address these questions?

Thanks, and kind regards,
Bill

[Paweł Cieszkowski]

Hi @Sahibi Miranshah is there anyway to disable this feature by default for all users? 

[Anton Tkachuk]

Hi @Sahibi Miranshah 

Is there a way to disable the cover image preview in the issue header? It’s automatically picking random cropped parts of attached screenshots as the cover, which looks odd and is confusing for users.

[Sergey Ostapenkov]

Switching off this new feature is not provided -> issue #1.
From UX point of view, now we have to clear the cover for each ticket - it's very strange behavior -> issue #2.
Even if you start using this feature - random attachment is represented with incorrect ratio which is not readable -> issue #3.

@Sahibi Miranshah please take a look on this thread and above questions/issues.

[Rick Westbrock]

There seems to be a pattern for the past year (or more) where Atlassian delivers UI changes with no way to disable which nobody asked for. Even in the cases where there is an option to disable a new feature it is always enabled globally by default. 

I really don't understand this "enhancement", how much business value is there in cover images?

[Bill Sheboy]

I wonder...

Perhaps Atlassian teams could observe how their sibling Jira Product Discovery (JPD) team actively monitors customer feedback and the community posts, and rolls back changes which cause more harm than the intended / forecasted benefit.  JPD seems to have a product manager rotation where they respond quickly to concerns / feedback on a daily basis.

[Sahibi Miranshah]

Thanks so much for all the feedback and questions so far. I wanted to share a bit more detail on how cover images work.

1. One consistent cover selector everywhere
   You’ll see the same cover selector on both work items and board cards, with the ability to choose from colors/gradients, photos from Unsplash, or image attachments as the cover.

2. Covers stay in sync between work item and board
   Whether you select the cover from the work item or from the board card, changes made in one place are reflected in the other. On boards, you can still control whether covers are visible via Board View settings → Card cover on/off, and turning this off only hides them on the board while the cover remains selected on the work item itself.

3. What happens in Software team‑managed (TMP) projects
   Previously, Software TMP boards could automatically use the first image attachment as a card cover; that board‑level auto‑attachment setting has now been deprecated for new behavior, but we’ve preserved backward compatibility so that any existing attachment that was being used as a card cover is now promoted to be the corresponding work item cover, which you can then manage like any other cover using the new selector.

4. Can cover images be disabled?
   Work item cover images are always available and can’t be turned off at a user, project, or site level, but you’re fully in control of each item. You can add/ change/ remove the cover via the More actions → Select cover flow on either the work item or the board card, and you can also hide covers on a specific board via Board view settings if you prefer a more compact board layout.

5. Performance and quality
   We’ve optimized the cover experience and underlying implementation so that it does not negatively impact work item performance.

[Rebecca]

@Sahibi Miranshah Can cover images be automated?
i.e.: Always set the card cover color "red" when a highest priority issue is created?

[Sahibi Miranshah]

Hi @Rebecca Automatic configuration of work item covers is not supported as of now.

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

Well, at least the work item history will show who added a cover (it appears to be an attachment). That should help the overloaded Jira admin who has to track down everyone who thought it was funny to add an AI generated image of dubious taste that appeared during a backlog review meeting.

Project and site admins should be able to disable the upload image feature of covers, in my opinion