title_body: How do I add a cover (and other pictures) to my ePub? If I am creating an ePub file by hand, from scratch (following a recipe such as laid out in this question), how would I go about adding pictures to the file? In particular, is there anything special that I need to do for a cover image?
upvoted_answer: Images in general should be added just as they would be in HTML, with an &lt;img&gt; tag. The image files themselves should then be included in the OEBPS folder or a subfolder (I generally use a subfolder, personally). Each image file will need to be declared in the &lt;manifest&gt; section of the content.opf file. As mentioned in the epub 3.0 specifications, the cover image in particular should also have the cover-image property assigned to it in the &lt;manifest&gt;, like so:
  
  &lt;item id="cover_jpg" properties="cover-image" href="images/cover.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg" /&gt;
  
  
  The &lt;manifest&gt; entry for non-cover images is the same, just without the properties="cover-image" bit.
  
  That's it for plain epub, but some retailers will also ask for a &lt;meta&gt; element in the &lt;metadata&gt; section of the content.opf file declaring the cover, like so (from Amazon's Kindle Publishing Guidelines):
  
  &lt;meta name="cover" content="images/cover.jpg" /&gt;
  
  
  Note that Amazon in particular no longer requires the &lt;meta&gt; bit as long as the properties="cover-image" is correctly declared.