Rank albums by their covers. Upload the artwork, drag each into a tier, and export your music taste.
Hit ＋ Add items to upload your album covers images — they drop straight into the tray.
This album tier list maker comes with no preloaded albums: you upload the cover art, and each image drops into the tray as a square tile — the right shape for a record sleeve. Sort the covers across the five starting tiers, flip the display to show each file name under its cover if you want titles visible, and download the finished board as a PNG.
Sleeve art gets judged in about half a second and then remembered for forty years. Every discography thread eventually turns into someone insisting the best record has the weakest artwork, or the reverse. This album cover tier list maker is built for exactly that argument: upload the covers you want to put on trial, whether that is one artist's whole run, a year-end shortlist or a genre, and rank them from S to D on how they look and nothing else.
Your images stay in your browser and are never uploaded to a server. Build your album tier list, recolor the tiers, export a clean PNG, and let the group chat explain how wrong you are. First board? how to make a tier list runs through it in about two minutes, and what S-tier really means sets the bar you should be holding those sleeves to.
You don't have to judge on artwork alone, either. Plenty of people use the same board as a straight album tier list template and rank the music itself — the cover art just makes the board readable at a glance. Photograph the sleeves in your vinyl record collection, gather a year of hip hop and rap albums, or build a rock, metal, pop or K-pop board from one band's catalogue. It stretches to a music tier list of songs or playlists too, as long as you have an image for each. Ranking whole genres instead of records? The music genre tier list is set up for that.
S-tier is for the artwork that stops the scroll, the kind you would frame and hang without owning the record. Strip the artist name off the front: if the image alone still makes you want to hear it, that is one of your S tier album covers. A-tier is strong and memorable, the sort of design other bands quietly copy two years later. B and C are competent — a decent photo, a clean layout, nothing you would ever describe to a friend. D is a stock portrait with the band name dropped on in a default typeface. Concept, typography and how closely the image matches the music all pull against each other, and that tension is the interesting part.
Three era-defining covers show how many routes there are to S. Abbey Road is a single photograph — Iain Macmillan got about ten minutes on a stepladder above a zebra crossing. The Dark Side of the Moon is minimalist design at its plainest: Hipgnosis put one prism and a spectrum on black. Unknown Pleasures is barely a picture at all, a plot of radio signals from a pulsar that Peter Saville flipped to white on black (the story is on Wikipedia). Photography, illustration, color palette, composition — an album art tier list can reward any of them, as long as you hold every sleeve to the same eye.
A one-artist discography run keeps every tile in the same context, so the arguments get sharp fast. A Kanye album tier list is the classic — The College Dropout through Donda is seventeen years of reinventions to sort. Taylor Swift works just as well once you decide up front whether the Taylor's Version re-recordings get their own tiles. Drake, Eminem and Tyler, the Creator all make strong rap album tier list boards, and so does a mixed hip hop albums ranking across artists.
Rock catalogues are longer and messier. The Beatles got from Please Please Me to Let It Be in seven years. Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett-era debut barely sounds like the Roger Waters years, which is exactly why ranking them is fun. Metallica, Radiohead and Deftones each split fans by era, and Michael Jackson's solo records make a shorter board you can finish in ten minutes.
Bigger lists work too. Take a slice of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die book or a RateYourMusic chart, and rank only the ones you've actually heard. Or finish off your 2025 albums and start a running board of 2026 releases — add each record the week it drops, and by December your album of the year has picked itself.
Browse every ready-made board, or start from a blank one.
Click “Add items” and upload your album images — they drop into the tray. Drag each into a tier, then Export PNG.
Nowhere — they stay in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, and your board is saved locally for next time.
Yes. Free forever, no account, and no watermark on the exported PNG.
Usually a strong image, memorable typography and a concept that fits the music. On this board it is subjective, though — rank the covers that grab you and let your S tier make the case.
Absolutely. Upload a single artist's discography and rank it sleeve by sleeve, or mix eras and genres for an all-time-best-covers board — the tray takes whatever images you add.
Opinions differ, and that's the point of ranking them. Common starting points include the zebra crossing on Abbey Road, the prism on The Dark Side of the Moon, the pulsar lines of Unknown Pleasures, Nirvana's swimming baby on Nevermind and Andy Warhol's banana for The Velvet Underground & Nico. Upload your own shortlist, drag the covers into tiers, and see whether the famous ones hold up next to the sleeves you love for personal reasons.
Either — the board doesn't care what you're judging. Rank a whole discography on the music and treat the covers as labels, or rank the artwork alone and ignore how the records sound. For a fair head-to-head, export a PNG of the music ranking first, then re-sort the same covers purely on the art and compare the two images side by side.
Yes. Click ＋ Add items, hit Choose images and select every cover file in one go — multi-select works, so a full discography lands in the tray at once. Each tile takes its label from the file name, so naming files by album title pays off when you switch the display to image plus label. Tiles default to square, which suits sleeves, and the Shape option can change them to round, portrait and a few others.
Upload only artwork you have rights to use. Album art and names belong to their respective owners; Tier List Maker is independent.