Bring your board to life with Card Images!

[#1]

Hey everyone, I’m Eoin, a Product Manager on Jira. I’m excited to announce that card covers have come to the board view of all project types. Card covers allow you to visually enhance your workflow by adding images directly to your cards on the board view, making it easier to identify, organize, and prioritize your work at a glance. They help you group tasks in a more visual way and bring a little more personality to your work!

Simply upload an image or select an image you’ve already uploaded as an attachment to display as the card cover and bring your board view to life!

Adding card cover images

To add or change an issue’s cover image on the board on a company-managed Software project or a Business project:

1. Hover over an issue.

2. Select ••• (more) on the issue.

3. Select Edit cover image.

4. Upload an image or select an image you’ve already uploaded as an attachment.

Once you upload an image as a cover image, it will also become an attachment to the issue.

Note on team-managed Software projects, you can add images as card covers through the Attachments panel within the issue view.

Hiding card cover images

Customize your personal view of the entire board by showing or hiding all cover images:

1. On the board, select View settings.

2. Select or de-select Cover images.

Note on team-managed Software projects, this is a project setting rather than a user level setting. 

Example of how to use cover images when creating content

One of my favourite examples of card covers is within a content creation process, where card covers feature thumbnails of images. This allows team members to quickly identify tasks related to specific pieces of content, like social media posts, ad creatives, or product visuals, without having to open each card.

1. Brainstorming

• Create cards for each content idea: Instagram post, Facebook ad, etc.

• Card covers feature thumbnails of initial concepts or rough drafts (sketches, color palettes, mood boards) to quickly distinguish between the different content ideas.

2. Content Development

• As tasks move to the development phase, the card covers are updated with in-progress visuals. For instance, an Instagram card might show the edited image or design layout, while a YouTube video card could display a still shot from the video shoot.

• This visual cue allows team members to see the status and content type at a glance, without having to open each card.

3. Review and Approval

• Cards are moved to the "Review" column on the board. Card covers display the final version of each piece of content, making it easy for stakeholders to provide feedback on specific visuals.

• The team can leave comments for final approval.

This workflow can help streamline team collaboration, enhance visual clarity, and speed up task recognition, especially when working with complex or large projects.

Please share how you are using card covers in the comments below!

Also please let us know if you encounter any performance issues, on loading or on scrolling for example. As mentioned above, it's possible to turn Card covers off if needed.

Thanks!

[Daniel Bagiński]

Hello, I haven't seen this option for company-managed software projects yet - not on Kanban or Scrum boards. Do you have any idea why? Are you still rolling it out? Regardless, I am super excited to see it go live!

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

@Daniel Bagiński I think this is still being rolled out. This feature is available in some of our instances, while it's still not available in others.

Btw, @Eoin thanks for sharing the update!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Eoin 

Thank you for this information.

As this feature deploys to additional project types, how will the performance issues with cover images be addressed so boards are not impacted?  Please see the defect on this symptom here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-25553

Kind regards,
Bill

[Eoin]

Hi @Bill Sheboy

We haven't specifically addressed the root cause of that bug. Instead we are carefully monitoring the impact of card covers performance. And in company-managed projects, we also give each user the ability to turn off card cover images under View Settings if they encounter any issues.

Thanks

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for that information, @Eoin 

As the root cause has not been specifically addressed yet, I suggest adding a note to your article about possible performance issues and how to disable the feature.  That will mitigate the possible increase in customers submitting support tickets for the symptom as they try the feature.

[Justin Uplinger]

It would be great to be able to set covers via automation. 

We've had quite a few requests to color-code cards based on a field and I could see that really well. At least for the default options!

[Danno]

I still don't have this feature yet.

[Elliot Jones]

Not available for me, but we'll wait until the real issues have been solved first. 

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Most bodacious!

Takk, @Eoin 

[James Rickards _Spark-Nel_]

This is great and a step in the right direction.

Will these images be visible on the smart cards on Confluence Whiteboards?

[Marcus Jacobs]

Did somebody just said "looks like Trello?" :D
I LOVE that Feature.

@Eoin are there any plans to make that feature available for automation or rest calls?

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks so much for this @Eoin and Atlassian - this def makes for better visuals!

Haha nice one @Marcus Jacobs - yeah, we moved from Trello to Jira almost 6/7 years ago and I missed this slightly.

I am totally with @Bill Sheboy  - performance should be top priority for this. We have a board that has around 1200 issues but some of our users struggle with the board and backlog. I know this will not be accepted easily bit will share it any ways

Question @Eoin  - what are the dimensions of the card cover images? I dug into dev tools and it looks like it sets ALL cover image heights to 140px? Is that right? Reason is in the past we had images that are by company logos and some are thin strips - this crops it at that height :( - any way that we can set cover images to either crop OR show the full image at it's proportion? Another use case is where we had users use cover images almost as issue dividers, though i know that is not ideal. See cover image below vs the actual test image

I mocked around the dev tools and created this - can this be achieved at all please?

Thanks for sharing the ability to allow users to show or hide covers  personally and the examples given - that helps a ton!

Thank you and Atlassian, once again!

[Amir Netiv]

Very nice feature!
Some productivity suggestions that would make it even better for adoption:

• If there was a way to automate it (same image for all epic related issues for example)
• If the images were global (not as attachments to the issue) so you don't need to re-attach them each time again
• If the image would show under the entire ticket (not just an upper ribbon)

Thanks again