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

[Sean Ray]

So I'm surprised I'm here again, mere months after the status label change debacle that caused an outcry I have never seen before among customers of basically any service. 

Dave Meyer, Sahibi Miranshah and his team's response was so bad I felt compelled to post, like I feel compelled to post again related to the topic of cover images for this post. 

For the second time in recent memory, the Jira team has rolled out a new feature no one asked for, applied it to every open ticket, and made it impossible to disable at scale (conveniently, anyway).

Who at Atlassian thinks these are good ideas? I've had people on my team think my tickets are bugged because these cover images just suddenly appeared one day as a banner image...for ALL tickets. And you have to manually disable each one.

Since Atlassian and the Jira team appear to have no real understanding of product design or UX, let me list out:

Why this is bad

• Real estate on screens is limited. Taking up a good chunk of the top of the screen with a blurry random image from the ticket makes it look like the ticket is bugged
• Selecting a random image to display adds no semantic meaning. It just seems to add something for the sake of an image appearing there. It tells me nothing useful about the ticket
• Jira now has a history of enabling new features by default and making them impossible to remove or edit (manually updating hundreds of tickets is a huge pain and was not even something that needed done until this update was rolled out)

As a single user, all I can do is provide my testimonial and experiences of encountering it with my team. We all agree -- it's unnecessary, bad, and adds more work for us that didn't exist before. Another massive L and very poor product thinking by Dave, Sahibi, and team. Please stop doing this and use your own products. It's pretty insane I know this much about the Jira team only because of how poorly the rollouts are implemented and received.

[Dimuth Tharindu]

How can I disable this 'feature'?

[Sahibi Miranshah]

Thanks for calling this out and for sharing the context.

On Software team‑managed (TMP) projects, if you previously had the board setting turned on to use the first image attachment as the card cover, those existing card covers have now been promoted to work item covers as part of this new experience.

The work item cover is a new feature intended to add some flavor, color, and visual flair to your issues, and to make boards easier to scan. Because card covers on boards already existed, we wanted to keep things consistent between the board and the work item. If you already had a card cover selected, that same image is now used as the work item cover, and going forward whenever you select or change a cover it will stay in sync between the board card and the work item cover.

If you’d prefer not to see covers on the board, you can hide them via your Board view settings. This hides the cover on the board only, while the cover can still exist on the work item.

If what you’re seeing doesn’t match this behavior (for example, covers appearing even though you never selected card covers or had the board setting off to use first image attachment as cover), please let us know your project type and share details so we can help properly triage what’s going on in your specific site.

Thanks again for the feedback – it’s really helpful as we roll this out.

[Sean Ray]

On Software team‑managed (TMP) projects, if you previously had the board setting turned on to use the first image attachment as the card cover, those existing card covers have now been promoted to work item covers as part of this new experience.

But why? Why not just ASK the user if you want to add something to all of their work items? Why just update hundreds, thousands, millions of work items across the Jira userbase? Just wire a function to a button in the settings or something and use coach tips to make the user aware that it's an option. Instead, you just forced a rollout on tens of thousands of unsuspecting people. 

This hides the cover on the board only, while the cover can still exist on the work item.

So this begs the question -- why not just allow it to be disabled entirely and have it disabled by default? I don't want it on the work item OR on the board view. It takes up space and doesn't tell me anything about the ticket.

A new feature intended to add to add some flavor, color, and visual flair to your issues

This should be entirely optional. We don't all want or need "flavor, color, visual flair" for our Jira tickets. Too much flair and color can make a UX overwhelming. Sure, if someone decides "Hey, you know what our ticketing system needs? More flavor and visual flair!" -- well, I guess Jira now has them covered. But most of us are just trying to process work efficiently. Adding in too much bloat makes that task more difficult.

The new feature makes the experience more confusing and strange-looking when there's a random screenshot taking up 10-20% of the top part of the screen. Imagine attachments that are just screenshots of text. They're now appearing above the title on tickets. It actually makes it HARDER to process information.

I don't think providing information about my particular project in my case will help, because it appears on the work item it's just always going to appear with a cover now.

The history of Jira just forcing onto users what a handful of designers think is best is problematic. 

I am not at all affiliated with Notion -- but I thought it might be worthwhile to mention that I use Notion for all new projects over Jira now (including enterprise plans), largely because of the very strange design choices Jira forces me into regularly at my day job.

I would strongly encourage Jira + Atlassian to pause the rollout and entirely rollback this update. It doesn't seem to have been thought through.