Use iTunes 7 to get brand new album art for your entire collection
This one comes, via IM, from my Aussie friend Chris Clark - so all due credit goes to him.
EDIT / UPDATE: Chris Clark, the very person who provided me with this helpful tip this morning, is now giving some pretty good reasons why not to do it. So, before you read this post, read his.
WARNING: This process will take iTunes quite a while to perform. So do not do it if you don’t have time to let it sit and do its thing. Also, do not do this if you have one-of-a-kind album art or you have scanned in album art, or even if you have albums in your collection from local bands that you’ve spent 8 weeks trying to find album art for them. They will not be found by iTunes’ “get album art” feature. Also, you must have an iTunes Music Store account for this feature to work. That being said…
If you’d like to get new album art for your entire collection, and not just the albums you are missing (you can get brand new higher-res album art to replace that old-and-busted .GIF file you downloaded from Google Images), simply do the following few steps.
- Open iTunes
- Select every song in your Music library
- Cntrl+Click (right-click on Windows or with normal two-button mice), and select “Get Info”
- Click YES or OK to the warning about editing multiple tracks
- Select the checkbox next to “Album Art” (making sure the box is empty)
- Click OK
Once the process is complete, select your entire music library again, click ADVANCED > GET ALBUM ART. This should rip through your collection downloading all brand new album art via the iTunes Music Store.
Now the new coverflow view (which was bought by Apple), will be even more stunning.
Thanks for the tip Mr. Clark. Did you find this tip useful? Consider digging it.
To all those desiring to comment: Please read the entire post before commenting. Reiterating points that I’ve already written up doesn’t do anyone any good, and I may moderate the comment.
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Awesome tip, will try it after work
thanks.
Alexander on September 13th, 2006 10:23 am
This is a great tip. Since iTunes now stores artwork downloaded separate from the song file, this is beneficial for keeping song file sizes down.
Ronald Heft on September 13th, 2006 12:31 pm
I wish iTunes stored the album art in the file, Ronald.
Hector M Torvisque on September 13th, 2006 3:02 pm
When I right-click on a song (or multiple selected songs), I get a “Clear Downloaded Artwork” option. Looks like that would be even easier.
Jonathan on September 13th, 2006 3:07 pm
Works great unless you have albums that are not on iTunes…then you get a nifty little placer…thanks!
SERIAL1227 on September 13th, 2006 3:24 pm
i am doing this right after reading it here.hope it finds for all my albums…great idea..
touche on September 13th, 2006 3:28 pm
Keep in mind that if the album that you *delete the album artwork for* is not an album that the iTunes Store carries, you won’t get artwork for it. But by then, it’s too late… you’ve lost even your low-rez artwork.
Mark Daniel on September 13th, 2006 3:37 pm
um, iTunes 7, upon the first opening after the installation will ask if you want to download the artwork for ALL songs in your library that is on iTunes. this is very easy to do if you accidently hit “no” just right click and it will say “get album art” and its download.
Mac Maniac on September 13th, 2006 4:00 pm
Mac Maniac: Yes but this is for all coverart, not just the missing ones.
Colin D. Devroe on September 13th, 2006 4:01 pm
you have to have an itunes account.
efren on September 13th, 2006 4:15 pm
didn’t work for me.
might have made things worse. but i have half my library without cover art. can’t seem to get it all. even on stuff that i know i tunes should have.
for example got one older radiohead album but not the rest.
if you can help me i would appreciate it.
nick kessler on September 13th, 2006 4:16 pm
I do remind you that this requires an iTunes account, and, therefore, some sort of credit card info.
Keep that in mind.
Paulo Köch on September 13th, 2006 4:22 pm
Thanks for the info.. It worked fairly well, but took a while. It even found some cover art I didn’t expect it to find.
John Kassimatis on September 13th, 2006 4:32 pm
nick kessler: Are the ID3 tags good? Be sure to clean up the album info, so that when iTunes does a search it has the right information.
Colin D. Devroe on September 13th, 2006 4:37 pm
Apple collects data on ALL songs that you get album art for. Read the EULA more closely. Are you sure you own all that music?
Steve on September 13th, 2006 4:45 pm
No one noticed that since the covers are stored separate from the file, they aren’t recognized anymore by the screensaver “iTunes Artwork”?
And.. what’s that “Local” folder in “Album artwork”?
Alan on September 13th, 2006 4:45 pm
Is it possible to do this for music stored on my iPod, or do I have to upload my entire library back onto iTunes using a shareware program in order to get the album art?
Eric on September 13th, 2006 4:53 pm
I hope this feature gets better.
A good three quarters of my music in iTunes is ripped from CD’s and doesn’t have album art. iTunes found and added art for maybe 10% of this and the rest is still blank. Most of these are even albums that iTunes sells. Bummer, the two new views are kind of lackluster with so much missing art.
Chris Coyier on September 13th, 2006 5:04 pm
Obvious, but obviously missed by many.
Do note though, with this method if iTunes doesn’t have a copy of the Album Art for any of your songs they will now be Album Art less.
Solution? Be selective.
Sam on September 13th, 2006 5:31 pm
Actually, if you read what Apple says, they warn you that they will transmit your music info to Apple, but that they don’t keep it. Of course they have to send it to their server if it’s supposed to retrieve matching art work.
BCBOCK on September 13th, 2006 7:32 pm
You get get an applescript that generates a list of tracks without cover art, from http://www.dougscripts.com/. You can then perform these steps on this playlist instead of your whole Library.
That way, you get to keep all existing cover art.
tunaranch on September 13th, 2006 8:04 pm
Hey….it worked great! Thanks for the tip.
Dennis on September 13th, 2006 8:56 pm
I’ve been trying to find a way to get my own artwork files (since I have all the covers to my CDs scanned in already, and iTunes is missing most) added as “album artwork” and not as embedded duplicates in all my mp3 files.
That “Local” folder in the new database directory structure gives me hope, but so far, no joy. No matter what method I’ve tried, iTunes 7 wants to embed local artwork directly in the file.
Rob Marquardt on September 13th, 2006 9:14 pm
If you right click on a track (yeah I’m using windows) you can choose “Get Album Art” BUT - even if it is sold in the iTunes store it may take a few tries to fetch it.
Maybe this feature is slow and buggy right now since so many people are trying it.
Dean on September 13th, 2006 9:25 pm
Consider running a recursive shell script which calls out to eyeD3 using the –write-images flag before doing this. (Script is left as an exercise for the reader — feel free to post yours as a comment…)
The idea is that this will leave a copy of your pre-existing artwork behind so that, if Apple can’t “cover” your album, you can reverse the process without resorting to backups.
You _do_ have your music backed up, don’t you?
Thomas on September 13th, 2006 9:57 pm
I had iTunes download album art, but it didn’t seem to get very many albums. Must be eitehr my naming of songs, or files - not sure cause it only got a handful.
Richard Testani on September 13th, 2006 10:13 pm
Just Great!
I just used it for my “purchased” file and the results are excellent.
I will try later with some of my non purchased.
Thanks for the tip!
gen on September 13th, 2006 11:05 pm
Its all about the tags bro… Make sure your tags match what iTunes has. Oh wait - do they even sell the song you’re looking to skin? If they don’t - they won’t be able to hook you up with skins.
Binary on September 13th, 2006 11:35 pm
Becasuse the iTunes downloaded art is stored in a different location (not within the actual MP3 FIle itself), will the artword still appear when i upload the song to my iPod video?
ff1re on September 14th, 2006 4:20 am
I don’t think the whole “get album art” is working correctly on Apple’s side yet. Last night I deleted the Violator album (Depeche Mode) from my collection and reripped it. iTunes didn’t find the album art, but at the bottom in the mini-store, it showed the same Violator album WITH cover art.
tom on September 14th, 2006 5:17 am
Is coverflow fetched artwork transferred over to the iPod?
matt on September 14th, 2006 12:39 pm
Here’s an odd thing I’ve noticed. Not all songs/albums from the Music store will re-fetch the artwork. I did this the lazy (and bad, heh) way, and got a bunch of tracks I purchased from iTunes that now don’t have their art. At least I’ve got a backup elsewhere, but something else to keep in mind (and why the appplescript to do it on just what doesn’t have art) is so useful.
Tom in AZ on September 14th, 2006 12:40 pm
Make sure that the Artist, Album Name, and Genre all match. Those are the three fields that iTunes sends across when searching
Mike on September 14th, 2006 2:36 pm
I set up an account just for the purpose of seeing all the Album covers; it would have been cool!
A total disaster; after following your simple easy to undertsand instructions to the letter….
All the album titles in the album column were deleted so now they’re blank! And no images were downloaded!
Any way to just go back to the way it was and forget about this great “feature”?
Nick on September 17th, 2006 12:40 pm
Here’s what to do, click on “Get Album Artwork”, Right mouse click and copy it (if using the album art preview in the lower left). Clear the Album Artwork out of the file, then paste it back into the file, this time it will write to the ID3 tag, and it’ll work on your ipod.
Wayne on September 17th, 2006 7:15 pm
I like this feature, but I noticed yet more odd behaviour. I ripped and imported the new Mastodon LP (”Blood Mountain”) this morning, and didn’t add art to the MP3’s before importing, to see what would happen. The art was added automagically, but looked pretty fuzzy viewed full screen - nothing like the quality I got from the iTMS from when hacks worked. I copied the image from iTunes (right click on now playing, select copy) and pasted it into Photoshop, and voila - proper hi-res 600×600 art. After saving, adding it into the MP3’s and reimporting, I had high quality art. Very strange…
Dan Walker on September 18th, 2006 4:50 pm
No matter whether I select the contents of a playlist or just one song itunes keeps trying to “get artwork” for my entire library, including music I KNOW I already have artwork for. I don’t want to lose that as I know some of it is not in their store!
Justine on September 19th, 2006 11:19 pm
This worked perfectly for me. But the album art downloaded with this method didn’t show up on my iPod though… Hope Apple will fix that.
Niklas on September 21st, 2006 10:14 am
I don’t have an american credit card, so i can’t create an itunes store account. Does it mean that i can’t use this feature?
Soldier on September 23rd, 2006 4:56 pm
there’s no charge for this feature, is there? and is there any risk if all your music isn’t purchased?
Sahej_b on September 24th, 2006 10:22 pm
Soldier: There are a few services out there now that are starting to use Apple’s system, without actually using iTunes. However you will need to replace your album art manually - one-at-a-time, until you do all of your albums.
Sahej_b: No to both questions.
Colin D. Devroe on September 25th, 2006 8:34 am
for those country yet not have iTunes store is hopeless.
blink4blog on September 26th, 2006 5:19 am
Worked pretty good for me, thanks for the tip!
Joe on September 29th, 2006 1:30 pm
does this work for getting album artwork onto your ipod?
stevo on October 4th, 2006 1:18 am
Gets the cover arts to iTunes library, but when I sync with the iPod, does not seem to copy the art to iPod. Any ideas?
Chel on October 4th, 2006 8:21 am
I have a lot of music from Limewire, is it safe to use the get aslbum artwork with that pop up that says they will send all your info to apple? Do I technically own it all now since it is on my computer. PLEASE HELP!!!!!
bekkee on October 4th, 2006 12:42 pm
bekkee, the only information that gets sent to Apple is the song title, track, id, etc. Also, if you read the popup it says that Apple does not keep the information it gathers.
Mike Stickel on October 4th, 2006 5:53 pm
Since I couldn’t find the answer here earlier today when I was trying to get my newly downloaded artwork onto my iPod (rather than just in my Library), I thought I’d add how I got it to work.
I changed the settings to Manually Manage, deleted all the music on the iPod, then changed settings back to Auto Update. Granted it took it quite a while to re-upload the 10GB of songs … but a spot-check confirms that the artwork is now resident on my iPod.
HTH
Paula Voegel on October 8th, 2006 8:25 pm
I had similar trouble getting my iPod to display the fancy new album art I downloaded into iTunes 7. Hit & miss which albums would actually get their art displayed on my iPod. I tried a cheaper variaton on Paula’s tip and had success.
With iPod connected, go to the iPod’s control panel in iTunes 7 (under Devices), uncheck the “Display album artwork on iPod” on the Music tab, and press Apply. Sit through update cycle, which effectively removes all album art from your iPod (but leaves the songs).
Once that’s done, reverse that process (re-check the box, hit Apply again), and if you’re lucky like me, all the artwork downloads to the iPod this time. Note that iTunes told me it was “optimizing album art for iPod” for quite a while, but still it was much faster than nuking & restoring all the song files. Good luck.
andy on October 12th, 2006 3:31 am
andy,
i tried your method a few times through. unfortunately, still no artwork on my ipod even after re-checking the “display album artwork…”
i see on the ipod that a new artworkdb file was written, however there are no ithmbs files in the that \Artwork folder and as expected, no album art on the ipod.
HELP!!!
roderick on October 16th, 2006 6:16 pm
I need some help. I’ve been trying for hours to try to match my tag up with iTunes, and I feel like I’ve done everything possible to make it match up (trying to get album art for Garden State Soundtrack). I can’t, for the life of me, get iTunes to see that it is the same album.
Any ideas?
I swear it has something to do with the fact that the tag iTunes lists in their store is Garden State (Soundtrack of the Motion Picture). I think the parenthenses are messing it up. Anyone else having this issue, or just me?
Mike on October 19th, 2006 4:08 am
Thanks Andy. Got it working. You are a champ.
Grant on October 21st, 2006 9:31 am
[…] Page Summary: Apple end categories –> Colin D. Since iTunes now stores artwork downloaded separate from the song file, this is beneficial for keeping song file sizes down. Be sure to clean up the album info, so that when iTunes does a search it has the right information. Not all songs/albums from the Music store will re-fetch the artwork.read more | digg story […]
» Force iTunes 7 to replace ALL your album art on October 25th, 2006 6:15 pm
[…] You can force iTunes 7 to replace all your album art in your music library, even replacing the old-and-busted low-res album art you found via Google Images.read more | digg story Posted by Ron Domingue Filed in News […]
rondomingue.com » Blog Archive » Force iTunes 7 to replace ALL your album art on October 26th, 2006 10:43 pm
If you want album art added to your files you can try the soundcrank iTunes plugin. It will also add lyrics to your files. I’ve found it actually gets album art that iTunes doesn’t find. It’s available at soundcrank.com.
n1k1s1x on October 31st, 2006 3:43 pm
ok im doing this now, but if u wish another method there is an itunesartimporter do a search on google, what u do is open itunes, highlight all the tracks in one album, open the art importer then click search, it will then search amazon for art, then give u a list, choose which one u find most relevent then click apply (check replace album art if you already have art stored that you wish to overwrite) i know this method is long, i myself have 80gigs of albums so u can imagine, but if you got the time this is a really good way of gettin the album art that itunes might not pick up by itself. also everytime u download a new album try do this method that way it doesnt seem like 50 albums all at once. common sense but my 2 cents, n e way enjoy and i hope it helps
Karim on November 4th, 2006 12:04 pm
Soundtracks are indeed a pain. I don’t think iTunes has managed to get album art for one soundtrack album, and I’m still wondering what’s the proper way to tag them. It also appears that there are lots of soundtracks that are simply not available in the iTunes store, although the scores for those movies are available.
DrLex on November 13th, 2006 2:43 pm
is there anyway to submit artwork to itunes? because how much easyer would that be if people just submitted the artwork for a cd they have even if its not sold on itunes. dont they do that for track names when you rip the songs from a cd?
willxcore on November 16th, 2006 10:22 pm
Just want to warn users with large shared libraries. If you put an iTunes share on a server, only the album art that you manually add to the music (through drag drop) will show up to remote users connected to the share. None of the iTunes auto downloaded album art shows up (although it does locally on the server). I investigated the mp3 binaries, and found that the tags for the album art are not being properly updated by iTunes when performing the automatic download(hence missing album art remotely), but are properly updated when performing a manual drag/drop operation. Hopefully APPLE will address this bug with next release beyond 7.02.16.
Art on December 23rd, 2006 6:21 pm
Hey
my question is kinda unrelated to this but i really need help on my itunes i have multiple album arts for a single song … when im listening to my music on my ipod and i want to look at the album art it only shows one of the album art.. like only the first one in the list of art pieces. how do i hav my ipod scroll through multiple art pieces per song? or is there no way to do so. if it helps my ipod is the newest one..the video thanks alot.
AlliG on March 1st, 2007 1:56 am
Hey so can anyone help…??
I downloaded a bunch of artwork for my ipod, but there were loads of album covers that itunes couldn’t seem to find.
So I set about saving the album covers I wanted as Jpg’s and then dragged these files onto the “Drag Album Artwork Here” box in the bottom left of the itunes window. Which worked fine. But I was wondering whether now the covers are on itunes, can I delete the covers saved on my computer or will this mean that itunes “can’t find certain artwork” at a later stage??
Stupid question I know, but I just wondered if I had to keep a big folder of artwork or could get rid of it??
Sam on June 11th, 2007 6:00 pm
It worked great!!!
I recommend using the program “ieatbrainz” to find missing tags and helping itunes find album artwork better…
Just follow the directions verbatim….
Jeff on June 29th, 2007 1:30 am
oh jeez, i just started this process and didnt think of it, 9 gigs of music may take a while huh?
aznk1d2 on September 28th, 2007 2:52 pm
Nice tip but I have another dilemma.
I have a lot of obscure albums already copied to I-Tunes but at a low bitrate. Since there are now larger capacity IPods I want to rip the cd’s again at variable bitrate but that means going through the entire process of naming every track rather than I-Tunes knowing the information by copying it from the existing library.
I cannot find any tips to make this easier other than investing in a proprietry tagging utility which is a real pain!
Jon on October 31st, 2007 3:47 pm
does this cost anything?
kay on November 4th, 2007 10:33 am
I tried this but nothing..just deleted the few bits of artwork i had…
I ran exactly as said..
gordon on November 15th, 2007 1:06 pm
I’ve got the soundtrack problem too.. Ive fount the only way to add artwork to soundtracts is to have the artist name the same as the album name.,, for eg. Song: Hakuna Matata, Artist: Lion King, Album: Lion King and have the ‘Get Info’ checked as a compilation. You can then change the artist name back once the album art is embedded.
having said that - ITS Damn Right ANNNOYYYYINGG!!
I have the deep feeling that this is too much hastle than what its all worth - so I think i’m going to go outside and kick a ball around.. no pretty pictures..
Matty on December 9th, 2007 8:15 pm
Can anyone help with a problem sharing album artwork.
Initially, iTunes was set up on just 1 user account on my laptop (Windows Vista) and everything was fine - all album artwork was displayed. I’ve now added iTunes to a 2nd user account on the laptop so in order for that to work, I moved the iTunes music folder to a shared (public) folder so both accounts point to the same folder. However, the album artwork is not displayed in most cases - some are there but some aren’t.
Is there a way of sharing all the album artwork between the 2 accounts? The only way I can find so far is to literally ‘find album artwork’ for each album on each account. VERY time consuming and also iTunes seems to put random artwork in for some albums. If I already have the artwork in the ‘Album artwork’ folder, can’t i just link it back to the music files?
thanks
Lee on December 24th, 2007 6:12 am
wtf! i lost all my covers
Xenon on January 4th, 2008 7:44 am
wicked, thanks!
ash on January 11th, 2008 1:25 am
wow great tip thanks a lot!!
Kev on February 4th, 2008 9:35 pm
id like to state to anyone that this method will NOT embed the artwork into the file, it simply makes a reference list to the album artwork folder
to embed it, you will need iTunify, and run it on your entire library to embed it.
also, itunes has been known to find alot of mistaken artwork, and even not at all (even on mainstream bands such as alexisonfire, dashboard confessional, yada)
evison on July 31st, 2008 1:11 pm