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Change a Playlist Picture on Spotify From Any Device

Posted on · Updated by Nadia Rowan in Spotify

verified_against vendor-docs (the maker's own help pages, and nothing else) · verified_on · what these mean

Change a Playlist Picture on Spotify From Any Device

Editing a playlist picture on Spotify is done in the Edit panel of the playlist itself, and it has worked from Android and iOS since Spotify shipped the feature to mobile several years ago.

Guides that say otherwise are describing a restriction that was lifted. There is no computer requirement here, and there has not been one for a long time.

The phone route

Open the playlist, tap Edit at the top, choose Change cover image, pick a photo, and tap Save.

The change syncs outward from there. Whatever you set on the phone shows up on desktop, in the web player, and on the link anyone opens, so there is no reason to redo it on a second device.

If the Edit control is not on your screen, you are looking at a playlist you do not own. That is the boundary Spotify draws: covers can be changed on playlists you created and nowhere else. A collaborative playlist someone else started, an algorithmic mix, an editorial playlist from Spotify itself, all locked.

The desktop and web route

Open Your Library, click the image on a playlist you made, choose a photo, then click SAVE.

The desktop flow is quicker if the picture already lives on that machine, since you skip the transfer step entirely. It is slower if the image is a photo you just took, and I would not bother moving a file across devices for this when the phone does the same job in four taps.

What a playlist picture on Spotify is allowed to be

Both sets of official instructions carry the same warning: make sure the picture does not violate any copyright, trademark, or personal image rights.

This is worth reading as a real constraint rather than boilerplate. The old advice circulating for this task was to search Google Images, filter by size, and use whatever came back, which describes taking someone else’s work without permission. On a platform whose entire catalogue exists under licence from rights holders, that is a poor habit to build.

Two sources that cost nothing and carry no risk: a photo you took yourself, or artwork you made, including something thrown together in a drawing app. A third option, images published under a licence permitting reuse, works only if you read the licence rather than assuming it.

Getting back to the default grid

Spotify’s help page covers setting a cover and says nothing about removing one, which is a gap rather than a hidden trick. In practice the way back to the automatic four-song grid is to replace the custom image rather than to delete it, and accounts that want the grid returned have historically had to ask support.

Decide accordingly. A custom cover is easy to set and awkward to unset, so it is the kind of change worth making once with an image you will keep rather than cycling through weekly.

One further limit: the cover is one image for the whole playlist and it does not adapt. It will be squeezed into a small square in Your Library and stretched across the top of the playlist page, so detailed pictures and anything with small text read badly in the first of those two places.

Sources

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