How to Set Custom Cover Images on Your PS5
The PS5 reads game library metadata from Sony's servers by default, which means your home screen covers can look outdated, mismatched, or plain wrong. A lot of people don't realize the console stores a local cache of these images, and that cache is editable. The most practical method right now involves a community web tool and a specific folder path on the console. Here is how it actually works. You need a PC or Mac, a browser, and your PS5 on the same local network. Open ps5cover.com in your browser. The site scans your PS5's library using the console's IP address, which the PS5 shares when it's in rest mode or simply awake on your network. Once it finds your games, you click individual titles and upload custom artwork. It has to be PNG format. JPEG does not work reliably because the PS5's image decoder handles PNG metadata differently and the files display correctly on the home screen. The resolution you should use is 1920 by 1080. Anything smaller looks soft. Anything larger gets compressed awkwardly by the PS5's internal scaler. I learned that the hard way with a batch of 4K PNGs I made in Photoshop. They uploaded fine through the tool, but every cover looked smeared and pixelated on the actual console. The workaround was straightforward: I resized every image down to 1920x1080 in bulk using a free image tool called ImageMagick, then re-uploaded. That cut my time from about forty minutes to roughly eight.
After the upload completes, the tool writes the files to the PS5's local storage automatically. You do not need to jailbreak the console or modify any system files. The PS5 stores custom covers at a path that starts with /data/secure/ at the root level, inside a subfolder labeled with your account ID. Sony does not document this path officially, but the community reverse-engineered it, and the tool handles the entire process transparently. Here is a detail most guides skip. The PS5 caches covers aggressively. After you push new images through the tool, your home screen might not update immediately. I waited ten minutes once, convinced the upload failed, when the real issue was just the cache. To force a refresh, go to Settings on the PS5, navigate to Saved Data and Apps, then Application Save Data. Select the problematic game and delete the cached cover data for that title. The next time you launch the game, the PS5 pulls the new image from the local custom covers folder instead of rebuilding from its default cache. This usually resolves the stuck-cover problem in under a minute. There are limitations you should know about before committing to this. First, the tool requires your PS5 to be discoverable on your network. If you have a strict firewall, a double-NAT setup, or you're on a guest network, the PS5 will not appear in the scanner. I ran into this when I was troubleshooting for a friend who used a ISP-provided router in bridge mode. The fix was simply disabling the guest network and placing both devices on the main LAN.
Second, any system update from Sony can break the custom cover functionality temporarily. When Sony changes the format or location of the covers folder, the tool stops working until the community patches it. This happened after the 8.00 firmware update in early 2024. The site was non-functional for about three weeks. If you rely on custom covers and you cannot wait, your only real alternative is to manually place PNG files into the correct directory using a USB drive in rest mode, but that path is much more tedious and error-prone. Another thing nobody warns you about: if a game title has a regional variant, the tool sometimes matches the wrong database entry. I uploaded a European cover for a game that had a different North American release, and the PS5 displayed the European version for the NA region title. The fix was to search the tool by the game's CUSA number rather than its name. Every physical and digital PS5 title has a unique CUSA identifier that you can find on the packaging or in the PS Store URL. Searching by that number eliminates any ambiguity. The tool itself is free. There is a donation option on the site, but it is not required. The community behind it maintains it independently, and it has been functional across PS5 firmware versions from 4.50 through the latest releases as of mid-2026. If you have a large library and want to apply custom covers to every game, expect the process to take roughly twenty to thirty minutes on the first run. Adding or changing individual covers afterward takes about two minutes per title.
Get the Full Details
If you only want to customize a few games, the effort is manageable. If you have over two hundred titles and want uniform coverage across all of them, it becomes a chore. In that case, some users resort to automated scripts that pull cover art from services like IGDB or Steam grid APIs, batch-process them to the correct resolution, and push them through the tool's API endpoint. Those scripts exist on GitHub, but they require command-line familiarity and carry a higher risk of breaking when Sony changes anything on their end. For most people, the manual web tool is the reliable path.
