Is there a way to automate cover colors?

[Ashley Longstaff]

When I add a colored label to a card, I'd like to have the corresponding cover color added to the card. Is there a way to make this automated so I don't have to manually change it every time?

[Blair at Atlassian · Accepted solution]

Hi Ashley,

Right now, card cover automation isn’t available within Butler, but we're tracking the demand for it! I’ll pass your interest in this on to our team for consideration—let me know if there's any additional info you'd like for me to send their way.

If you're curious about how our team decides on what requests we work on, this article gives some insight into that process: http://help.trello.com/article/724-submitting-feature-requests-for-trello. We've also published a blog post with more detailed and visual information here: https://blog.trello.com/feature-requests-unite-support-and-product

If you'd like to see our latest features and releases you can take a look at our dev board at http://www.trello.com/dev. Our mobile boards are available at https://trello.com/b/5tj4qAvo/trello-ios-app and https://trello.com/b/ud59t1fL/trello-android-app.

Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns, and have a productive day! 

[Clayton Ritchey]

I am interested in this as well. 

[Craig Thomler]

Ditto - this is a basic thing I need.

[Will Jeffreys]

Could really do with this

[Brad Hill]

I have the same need.  Would LOVE this functionality!

[Eric]

100% Same here!

[Deana Zizzamia]

Agreed looking for this feature! 

[Client Care]

definitely a need!!! Please add this feature.

[ecasteel]

I'd also love to be able to automate cover color selection in Butler. Note that I don't want the label color applied -- I want to be able to specify which color is applied when I set up the Butler workflow.

[Nicholas Rouse]

I'd like to be able to do this too.

Any idea if this will happen anytime soon?

[Seth McGowan]

Absolutely interested in access to automating cover color to help organize the board. 

[Robert Weger]

I would like this feature added to Butler as well.  Changing Card Cover colors would be most excellent workflow addition :-)

[Rob Wilkinson]

I'm also looking for this automation. Working on a team board, so want the possibility to have card change colour depending on who it is assigned to. Will make monitoring a team board much easier for all participants. 

[Connor Culleeny]

Please add this.

[Veronica D]

I found this post because I was looking for this automation too. It would be great to be able to change or assign card cover colors automatically when you move a card to another list.

[Mateo Yi-Shu Tsien]

Me too. This can be very useful, as it makes the card stand out and look more important! Thanks.

[Alison Starr]

Another vote for YES PLEASE!

[Tom Leach]

YES PLEASE!

[Cristiano Fontes]

Add it please, would be super helpful for lead management, for example adding a $ Cover to a high income lead.

[Giovanni Vecchi]

Me too!!!

[Dave Perry]

I would be interested in this also. Being able to create a Card Button that added a #tag and changed the cover would be very helpful.

[Oshine]

Vote yes to automate card covers/colors

[Kai Jin]

Yes please

[Bryn Humberstone]

Yes to this - even if initially it is just the ability to remove a card cover (it is quite annoying that emails forwarded to a trello board often include an image in the signature block, which then get added to the card's cover.)

[olena]

yes please!

[Hannah Massey]

Yes please here too!

[martyn.walmsley]

I would like to be able to move a card between lists on cover colour change.

[David Bakkers]

+1

The ability to set or detect a card's cover size and color, or changes thereto, within Butler workflows would be very useful.

[Wendy Strain]

The lack of this feature is primarily what holds me back from upgrading my plan. Cover colors would be helpful, but the ability to automate the addition of card cover images would be ideal. I use specialized card cover images to help me organize projects and activities within my boards. It can take a lot of time to set up a new week adding images manually. To have that cover automatically added when new cards are created would be a huge time saver and worth the upgrade on its own. 

[Erling Hounisen]

at my companie we need this aswell. we use the cover color to see what HAS to be done today, and so it would be a very nice thing that we could change cover color automaticly with butler.

[Travis Chalmers]

Yes please! Would be very helpful.

[Jennifer Madino]

I would love this - at minimum I would really like to upload a custom image for the cover to be available in ALL cards on a single board.

Right now I can upload to each card one by one and change the cover but I'd prefer to just upload the media once then pull from my own gallery (instead of the stock images or only colors) when customizing my card.

but automating would be even better!!

[Sara Lynch]

I would love this too - it is hard to explain to others to manually change the color each time - it would be great it it could be dependent on a custom field Drop down selection

[Sara Melca]

this would be awesome!

[JP]

I would love this feature! And I'm the app as well!

[Sarah Cole]

This would be SO useful.

(I'm on the Mac app.)

[srininara]

This is really a needed feature. Please make it happen.

[Vicki]

This would be a really handy feature!

[Maria Ballestrino]

This would be really helpful. Please include it in your next update.

[Zach Noonan]

Yes please do this! Very helpful for people with ADHD and want things to be color coded automatically!

[Hanna Seweryn]

This feature would be super helpful, please please add it.

[Maik Kade]

Would absolutley love this as well- We use a custom field (colour coded) for card priority and than adjust the covers manually to same colour for better visibility...if I could automate this by butler (set card cover to custom field colour) would be really cool (and I would need less time to "clean up" my teams cards :-)

[Addison Newman]

I could also make great use of this feature!

[FoxinuhhBox]

I too want 

[Natalie Robb]

This would be a really useful feature, please add it!

[Morgan Balas]

Please add! :)

[JP Tomberlin]

Yes please add this feature!

[Josh Young]

I vote yes for this feature to be added to Butler!

[Ms. Jess]

I would like this feature, please.

[Constantino Lozano]

This feature would definitely be helpful

[Steve Ragle]

This was the first automation I reached for, was disappointed that it is still not available despite being requested for over 2 years!  This would be a very nice addition, as many people are highly visual and color/covers really help when glancing at a board.  Please add this.

[Wesley Ng-A-Fook]

Same here. Would love to see this feature.

[Robert Duncan]

+1 for this feature, echoing all of the above.

[Erika Mellmann]

I'm in.  I would love to be able to automate cover changes...right now, I'd like to be able to change the cover to hide the text and give that cloudy (light or dark) look automatically.

[Emmanuel Bréton]

same as above: +1

[Elizabeth Kahle]

August 2022 chiming in to beg for this feature please.

[Michael Delfausse]

Please add me to the list. Now that you have nullified the extensions which did this, please, please, please consider doing this.

[Liam]

Please add this!

[Lawrence Guerra]

Wow. It's been over two years since the original posting and this functionality is still missing from Trello. Adding cover automation (color change, cover removal/addition) would be a terrific little tweak to make the whole Trello experience more robust. I can't image that it's a matter of way; it has to be the lack of will...or listening to customer feedback. I know the company I work for is paying for enterprise level access. Responsiveness to (paying) customer feedback/input counts for a lot with these types of applications. That's where we begin to see separation between the middling performers and high-end systems.  Please add soon. Thanks.

[Patrick Wallace]

@Atlassian  This seems like a very requested feature that would be easily programmed. Where does this feature fall on the roadmap. If you can have "when custom field is set to "x" add the smiley sticker surely you can have ... "change the card cover to  green". we want this very badly! 

[Josemi Mejia]

Still waiting for this feature...

[Angela Anders]

Waiting for this automation.  Does anyone know if it can done via Zapier?

[Liam Harrington-Missin]

yes please.

[Lewis Melville]

Ditto, this should be possible.

[Mike Stevens]

Desperately keen on this feature. Wild and bizarre that it isn't a thing already. 

[Vianne Heusdens]

Need!

[Julia Lords]

I definitely need this feature.
Preferably within the automations, so that when the due date/time is scheduled for a particular time, the card cover changes to either an already uploaded image, or it generates a card cover with the time as text on the cover.

[Tristan F]

I strongly need this to be added.

[fernandoluiznemechibli]

I would really like this, please implement it!!!

[Mats Berggren]

Any news on this? It has been four years!

[David Bakkers]

Although Butler currently can't change a card's cover directly via an Action, you can do it indirectly using Butler's cool HTTP requests Action to send a suitable PUT request to the Trello REST API to update the card and set the values you want for the cover.

To do this, create a Butler rule, add the Trigger you want, then add an Action of the type Content and the sub-type 'put to url with payload'.

The url would be the endpoint for cards, followed by the variable that will be  substituted by Butler with the ID of the card you want to alter, which would be:

https://api.trello.com/1/cards/{cardid}

and the payload would be the JSON formatted request that would contain your key, token, and the settings you want for that card's cover. For example, this payload would change the card's cover to green, full size:

{"key" : "[your_rest_key_here]","token" : "[your_rest_token_here]","cover" : {"color" : "green","size" : "full" }}

Here is the resulting Action:

Here is an example of that Action being triggered when a new card is created on the board:

Here is a closer look at the rule, showing the Action in more detail:

By altering the HTTP request's payload, you could set the card cover's color, size, text brightness etc, or even add an Unsplash image.

[derekantrican]

This is fantastic! While Trello's card covers don't exactly result in the appearance I want, this definitely will get you there

[Sarah Cole]

Hey, thanks for this workaround! 

I'm struggling to get this to work but perhaps I'm making a mistake with the API codes—do the REST API values differ from the regular API values I've retrieved from https://trello.com/app-key? 

Any advice appreciated. 

***

EDIT: Never mind, it started working fine a while after I posted this!

[Rosa Clark]

Darn. It's not working for me.  Here is the code. Thoughts about what I am doing wrong? Thanks

[Rosa Clark]

Are the api and regular keys different? 

[Sarah Cole]

@Rosa Clark No, that was the right key in the end. I've replied to your other comment with suggestions btw. 

[Sarah Cole]

@David Bakkers Hi David, thanks so much for this endlessly useful workaround. 

I was just wondering if you have a similar technique for automating the removal of card covers? I've tried a few approaches using bits from the REST API documentation but haven't had any success yet. No problem if not—I'm sure I'll get it eventually.

[David Bakkers]

@Sarah Cole 

The cover is removed by 'resetting' all the values for the whole cover, like this:

{"key" : "[your_rest_key_here]","token" : "[your_rest_token_here]","cover" : ""}

[Sarah Cole]

@David Bakkers Brilliant, that makes complete sense now you say it. Thank you very much for your help. 

[Joe Adevai]

PLEASE add this automation for Covers!

[Nick Pye]

Please add this.

It's been two years since the original request and a lot of time and effort has been expended by people trying workarounds.

I'm no techi so all that API and code stuff turns me off.

Please just do it. It seems a fundamental ommission.

[Elizabeth Kahle]

It has been two years. It's been so long, I actually left. I use Trello for very different, low level things now. I moved over to Notion, which has a great -highlight all and bulk change properties- function. Extremely useful!

[Nick Pye]

Thanks for the tip, Elizabeth. I'll check Notion out now. 👍

[Marcus]

Here is an adaption of David Bakkers' excellent workaround: although David's fix worked for me in that it "did what it said on the tin", this isn't quite what I wanted - what I actually wanted was to apply a "header" or "partial" cover rather than a "full".  As you can see, I'm struggling to give a precise name to the type of header that I want and that same problem gave me grief when it came to trying to adapt the “payload”; I unsuccessfully tried updating the “cover” def' as follows:
{"color" : "green","size" : "part" }

{"color" : "green","size" : "partial" }

{"color" : "green","size" : "header" }

As I say, none of these attempts worked so I thought “what the hell, let’s just see if the default works” and I'm glad to report that this was successful with the simple:

{"color" : "green"}

The down-side to all of this is that this fix is dependent upon the current Atlassian implementation of the [Create a Rule] feature which I guess could change at any time.

[David Bakkers]

Hello @Marcus 

The cover size can be set to one of two values: 'normal' or 'full', with normal being the default if you don't define a size.

To know more about the other settings for the cover, including putting a picture inside the cover or setting the brightness of the text compared to the background, refer to the Update a Card section of the Trello REST API documentation page.

[THIAGO MANGANELLI]

@David Bakkers  it did not work for me I tried everything 

[Sarah Cole]

@THIAGO MANGANELLI I couldn't get it to work but I left the new rules in place and they started working within a couple of days. Not sure what caused the delay, but it's fine now. Perhaps you have a similar issue?

[Rosa Clark]

@Sarah Cole Hi, i could not get this to work at all.  I want the card cover to turn green when a certain label is applied.  I got the API key from https://trello.com/app-key and I can manually generated the token from the link on the same page.   Any help would be great.  Thanks

[Sarah Cole]

@Rosa Clark Hi! The code does look right to me. When did you set this up and test it? Yesterday? Trello has been down on and off over the last couple of days and that's affected the automation—I found that even simple rules weren't working as expected.

If so, maybe delete it and try setting it up again today. 

I did find that it took a day or so for the card cover rule to start working for me after I set it up anyway. No idea why, maybe something to do with the API? I'll try setting up your rule shortly to see if I can replicate though, and report back! 

[Rosa Clark]

@Sarah Cole Thanks for the reply.  I just turned the rule back on and will see if it works. Did you find anything when you tested the rule? 

[Rosa Clark]

@Sarah Cole gaaahhh.... No go. It's been two days and I still get the error message "Butler could not run your rule when the yellow "Channel: Email" label is added to a card by anyone, put to URL".  Oh well, I tried! Thanks for the replies. 

[David Bakkers]

Hello @Rosa Clark 

I can see something wrong. At the end of your token there is a right square bracket:

Keys and tokens contain only alphanumeric values (letters and numbers), like this:

Key: 00d2ac3c23e82d32545537e54feafb22
Token: 94a658cd2a6b32083ddeeff90cb721f7de6801e2a7d0f3fecadef5262fa0f351

so that square bracket should not be there.

My use of square brackets for [your_rest_key_here] and [your_rest_token_here] was just for demarcation. The actual put to url payload would be:

{"key" : "00d2ac3c23e82d32545537e54feafb22","token" : "94a658cd2a6b32083ddeeff90cb721f7de6801e2a7d0f3fecadef5262fa0f351","cover" : {"color" : "green","size" : "normal" }}

[Sarah Cole]

Good spot @David Bakkers! I missed that completely—maybe it's time for new glasses...

[Rosa Clark]

ah-ha! @David Bakkers that's a cut & paste error.  OK, I'll give it a try.  TYVM

[Rosa Clark]

It worked @Sarah Cole and @David Bakkers ! Thanks both for your help.

[Jonathan Moore]

@David Bakkers @Sarah Cole Instead of making a new post on this, I figured adding on to this conversation might be valuable for others like me who find this thread from Google (especially since it's so fresh!)

I'm looking for a variant on using this API option to add a custom cover that's pulled from an Imgur album I made of various swatches to add custom cover color (so I don't have to worry about running out of the ones available from the Colors palette - is that also doable using a similar command?

Edit - Since I'm currently using the existing cover colors as a stopgap, what's the list of colors? I can see two "greens" and two "blues" - couldn't get any answers when I inspected the element in Chrome

[David Bakkers]

@Jonathan Moore

Refer to the Update a Card section of the Trello REST API documentation, which documents all the cover settings, including the different colors and how to use images.

Using an image located anywhere other than Unsplash for the cover is not easy, since it will require that the image is already attached to the card and you know its unique attachment ID, which will require a pre-lookup of that ID using the REST API via a separate call.

[Thomas]

@David Bakkers 

How would you do that exactly?

I mean, I could create template (o reference) cards and in some way copy the cover image from there?

I would really appreciate if you could give me some more hints/help.

Thanks in advance

[suzie]

^ Same question!

[Steve Kessler]

I NEED to automate color covers when they move lists.

[QC QC]

Yes Please Add!!!

I've been waiting for this for far to long!

Give us some colors!!!!

[Doug Cranmer]

+1 to this request to automate card covers. The REST API method listed above seems to have stopped working.

[Rosa Clark]

Hello @David Bakkers this isn't working anymore. Do you or anyone know if Trello made some back end changes that would cause this workaround to fail? 

[Maria Ballestrino]

I would also love it if this feature could be added!

[Wendy Goodwin]

PLEASE, PLEASE add this ability!   The more visual you can make these cards, the more intuitive they will be and the faster we can process them.  If the purpose of automations is to speed up our work flow, having the ability to visually categorize our cards dramatically improve our efficiency.

[PouwelsAB]

Very interested also !

[Sara Lynch]

Still wanting this - still waiting for this (it has been a while .....  ) 
(I would like to use a custom Picklist from the card to change the Cover color automatically ) - or a date field (ie overdue / approaching etc)
(Using 'Label' would be difficult to automate when a card could have more than 1 label)

[Wiktor Gruszczyński]

DO IT

I would love to link color with word or code i use in card ex. MAIL or RAPORT

[Mike Stevens]

Badly want this!