Thumbnails doesn't match the episode on app

[SLSR]

Hi there,

I'm hosting a podcast (at Buzzsprout) and are experiencing troubles showing the right thumbnails in the podcast-feed in Spotify. My RSS-feed looks fine and is correctly linked between each thumbnail and episode, and on desktop and in some devices it's not a problem. But on my husband's and my iPhone as an example, Spotify keeps mixing the thumbnails so that they don't match the specific episodes. The episodes are with different guests, and the podcast is in it's beginning, so it's pretty critical that potential new listeners / followers meets the correct feed. 

Hope it makes sence 🙂 

Has anyone else experienced the same? 

[joshwar_porter]

I'm having the exact same issue. On the Spotify podcasters website the thumbnails have been uploaded fine, but on the Spotify app the thumbnails keep getting jumbled / mismatching the episodes

[Ivelina]

Hey folks, 

Welcome to the Community! 

If this is happening on multiple devices, it's best to reach out to our colleagues from the Podcast team here. They can take a look and assist in the best way 🙂

Cheers and we're here if there's anything else.

[psullivan6]

Hey there, I wanted to clarify that this issue is prevalent for every podcast I interact with as well, so it’s not specific to the OP’s podcast only. This includes episodes from global top 10 podcasts.

Please see a screenshot example of the issue, noting that it’s from February 2024. It’s July 2024 and the issue still persists.

Short of asking each podcast owner to report to the Podcasts team, is there another update? And/or a bug fix link we can follow and “+1” besides this thread?

[Elena]

Hey @psullivan6,

Thanks for reaching out!

I tried replicating and the episodes you shared have the correct thumbnail on my end, so could you you confirm if this is happening only on your phone or on all devices you use? If possible, you can also check with someone else how it looks like on their end and ask them to log in to their account on your device to see if there's a difference.

Let us know how it goes.

Take care

[BHodges]

It's happening on my iphone as well. The podcast I am looking at is Family Proclamations, and the thumbnails go all willy nilly when I play an episode, although the cover art is correct on the playing episode itself. 

[BHodges]

I'm getting reports from friends that they are seeing the same thing. Episode thumbnails are mixed up, but when you play an episode the correct cover art is displayed. 

[Joan]

Hi folks,

Thanks for the replies. 

We've been looking into this and here's what we've been able to gather. Follow the steps below that best apply to you:

• If you publish your own podcast and are facing issues updating the thumbnails, be advised that these can take 24 hours to update. See here for more info.
• If you (as a user) are facing issues where the image is inconsistent between the queue, the Now Playing view and others, this is most likely a caching issue. Perform a clean reinstall on your device, this should help resolve this
• If the image is wrong everywhere you look, across multiple devices and regardless of who looks at it, this is most likely an issue with the podcast itself. You can report this to Spotify here or reach out to the creators

Hope these help you out.

[BHodges]

Hi Joan! I did a fresh install and it didn't resolve the issue. I am seeing this happen on several different podcasts, not just mine, so I don't believe it is an issue with localized devices. I think it's an error with the app itself. 

[johnjurko]

I'm having the same issue here on my ios app and my macbook app. All of the thumbnails are jumbled for podcasts. Pretty much every podcast that uses different thumbnails for each episode. It's been like this for a while and seems to be getting worse. I just got a new computer and installed the app on here and same issues. Cheers!

[OUTATIME88]

Hi everyone!

Some of my podcast listeners (hosted on Buzzsprout) are experiencing this issue as well. While I can't speak for all of them, it seems to be a problem with iOS/iPhone. Has anyone noticed similar issues on Android phones? I haven't.

Specifically, the order of my podcast episodes stays the same on the Spotify podcast page, but on some iPhones, the cover art appears in a random order. For example, the cover art for episode 3 might show up next to episode 1, and so on.

I'm considering switching to another hosting service, but I'm unsure if that would solve the problem. Asking my listeners to clear their cache or reinstall the app everytime this happens doesn't seem like a viable solution either.

Since I'm not experiencing the issue myself (but multiple others do), I unfortunately don't have any screenshots at this moment in writing.

[MihailY]

Hey folks,

Apologies for the late reply.

We've tested this on multiple devices with the aforementioned podcasts, however we're still unable to reproduce the issue. In order to report it to our tech team, we'll need the following:

• The models, OS versions and exact Spotify versions of the devices you've tried this on.
• The names or links to the affected shows.
• The exact steps to reproduce the issue.

 Once we have this info, we can continue our investigation.

Cheers,