Album Artwork best practices?

[jiminoc]

I was curious if you select one jpg for your album art for 10 songs, does it store that artwork 10 times for each song or does it store just the one image and keep an index of what songs go to what art?

I noticed in the guide it says it keeps an index but i've read people here say it increases each mp3 file by the size of the jpg ?

If I drag and drop an image from amazon for album art, does itunes resize the image to the correct resolution or do I still need to make sure my images are 200x200 or something like that?

thanks :)

Jim

[narkerbyt]

- I'm not sure but I think iTunes add an image for each song, but not sure tough.

- iTunes resize the image to the correct resolution.

[recchi_8]

yikes, really?
seems like you could really waste some space with album art eh? :(

[jiminoc]

also, since the artwork binds itself to the song, will playing the mp3 in another non-ipod mp3 player still work?

[Code Monkey]

Album Art is part of the mp3/mp4 standard. The artwork is embedded in each file and, no, it doesn't affect playing the files on any other player. iTunes does nothing to adjust resolution. Put a crappy 100x100 pic and that's all you have, put a gargantuan 1600x1600 pic and that's what gets embedded.

[narkerbyt]

album art looks so good on the iPod that I doubt it doesn't resize the images or changes the resolution.. overall if they're too big (1600x1600).
I mean, I guess iPod generates 2 version for each artwork, one sized in order to display it correctly when playing a song, and other which is just attached to the mp3..

maybe I'm wrong

[Code Monkey]

Originally posted by narkerbyt
maybe I'm wrong Computers have been able to "resize" on the fly forever when displaying an image in window smaller than the pic resolution. I suppose it's possible the photo is caching a thumbnail similar to what it does with separate photo files, I don't have one, but there's just the one image in the actual file.

[Wolffe]

iTunes embeds the artwork, as-is, into the audio file. When that file gets transfered to the iPod Photo, it resizes the artwork and places that resized copy into its own database on the iPod. It does not modify or remove the artwork that remains embedded in the actual audio file.

Thus, two copies of the artwork, for every single track, will exist on your iPod.

How large the artwork should be depends on where you plan to view it. On an iPod, 200x200 (which is what I use) is already more than enough since the the artwork isn't even given that much screen real estate.

[dpodiluk]

i just tried to add some art to an album on my iphoto. the art was 1024x1024 at about 380k, i scanned it myself. i checked the mp3 files on my ipod and they are all 380k bigger :( so with 12 song thats 4 megs waisted. is there a way to add art to ipod so it displays in now playing and not add it to the files?

i'd hate to resize them all 147x147 to save space, this will really suck for the 200+ albums i ripped.

[narkerbyt]

let's guess all of your artwork are at about 380k and let's guess all of your albums holds 12 songs.. 4*200 = 800.. 800 megs of artwork... wow, I was going to tell you it was a small amount of space but it seems not :S

anyway.. I don't think all of your artwork is at 380k :D

[dpodiluk]

your right not all of it is 380k, just the covers i scan for my CD's. the ones i grabbed from amason and what not are pretty small. wish itunes gave you an option not to save the artwork in the files themselfs

[Code Monkey]

Originally posted by dpodiluk
your right not all of it is 380k, just the covers i scan for my CD's. the ones i grabbed from amason and what not are pretty small. wish itunes gave you an option not to save the artwork in the files themselfs And why exactly would you want iTunes to give you an option that violates the standard for the music files? :confused:

You always have the option to use lower res pictures or not to use album art at all, but iTunes is merely providing access to part of the mp3 and mp4 standard.

[Stevie61]

All of my artwork is under 100k so im ok.

[ocellnuri]

I wish the iPod photo could just read artwork from the ID3 tag itself. Then I wouldn't have to use iTunes to manage my music just so I can get artwork to show up.

[Snapper]

Holy smokes folks! Get your album covers off the net and make sure you have them in jpg format. Mine are on average just 5K in size, there is no reason for them to be any bigger!

[rfaison]

Whoa - take a deep breath there .. I know what you're saying (when I grab images from the net, Amazon and the All Music Guide, are where I go first, then Googling album names I don't find there ... these are typically 200x200 .jpg files). .jpg (pronounced 'jay-peg' means they are compressed and thus are usually quite small). Just checked a handful of my 200x200's and they are 7 - 12.8KB.

But, I've also grabbed larger (500x500 at Amazon) which are around 35 - 50KB (still on the small side)

The bigger issue for folks "rolling their own" album art, ie, scanning, may be negotiating the level of compression in saving the file. This makes a huge difference in the file size.

In Photoshop and Photoshop Elements 2 or 3, there is a "save for the web" command which brings up a dialog where you choose the quality level - I just did the following on a scanned file 300x297 of a classical CD cover I did myself a few weeks ago.

The original cropped file is 300x297 pixels which saved with least compression possible: 105KB which opened to 257KB:
at 'High' quality setting (60%) --> 39.5KB
at 'Medium' quality setting (30%) --> 18.2KB

Then I reduced the file to 200x198 pixels and
at 'High' --> 16.8KB
at 'Medium' --> 8.17KB

... HUGE differences eh? and the difference is quality is very subtle (as in essentially undetectable - especially on ipod screen!)

So - especially if you're doing much of your own album art scanning, this may be worth learning about. Most any image program (ACDSee, PaintShop, the Microsoft one, probably the free Picassa - get it from Google - to name just a few) gives you some control over the degree of compression when saving .jpg files. You may haved to poke around in the menus to find it.

It's the same trade-off as choosing what settings to rip mp3's- the more compression, the smaller the file, and the more deterioration from the larger file ...

Hope this helps (and if it's more than you ever wanted to know - sorry!)

[mrbranch]

Question: How to remove album art per album then? or a playlist maybe? I just wanted to remove them, and resize. The space it uses up is valuable. :D

[Wolffe]

Select all the tracks that you want to have the album art removed from, right-click, select Get Info, check the "Artwork" checkbox but do not select any artwork, click OK and iTunes will remove all of the artwork in those files.

Basically, you've chosen to assign empty artwork to all of those tracks so iTunes removes what is there.

For a single track, you have to go to the Artwork tab within Get Info and manually delete each image. It's actually easier and faster to do multiple tracks at once.

[rfaison]

Good question - my knowledge of how to do this in iTunes is limited (I was using another program, Media Center before iTunes for Windows was released and I continue to use it for this kind of stuff and then sync with iTunes).

Here's what I see (and if there are better ways, PLEASE offer them up) 'cause this seems rather cumbersome in places.

1. Seems that art is removed from one file at a time in iTunes. Get the album tracks listed in the bottom pane, then right-click on first file --> select 'Get Info' --> go to 'Artwork' tab - click on the cover art to select it (the delete button becomes an option when you do this) -- click 'delete' -- then click 'Next' to do the same for next file ... continue for each song on the album.

[An aside: You can add art to multiple files at once (select them all, right click, dble-click on window for art, browse to art file, etc), but I didn't see a way in that dialoge to delete art from a file. In fact the art window is still blank, even when art shows up for each song when examined individually - I don't get this part of iTunes]

If you added the cover art manually then you probably know where the original art file is on your computer (as opposed to art in music from the iTunes store - I don't know where those files are - but thats mostly OK since I don't need to do anything with them.)

You'll need to go to those files, make your modifications, then re-connect them to the music in iTunes - which can be done to all the files, in the album, at once (see the above aside).

Like I said, somewhat cumbersome - but should work. And you'll definitely save some space in the end.

Hope this is clear (relatively!).

RF

[rfaison]

And that's why Wolffe is a Senior Lounger and I'm a mere Junior!!
Thanks for that little tidbit!

RF

[Operator99]

K- well I have about 8000 tracks on my 60 photo and all have album art on them, cause i like to see it on the Ipod - However, if you want to use it so that when you print out your collection using Album as the sort by, you only need it on one track on the album and when you print your list it will show the album art for the whole album listing.

And yes it definetly adds it to the file- at least to MP3's - (pretty much all i use) because if i play them back on another player that supports album art - Like Musicmatch Jukebox, the album art shows up.

[snowboardinyank]

im not so sure about how ipod color does the album art but i believe that it stores 2 photos for each song one resized and one not i might be wrong but if you do like snapper says then youll only have 5k files so i guess it doesnt matter much

[scdeimos]

I know this is an old thread now but...

I've conducted some experiments tonight using Apple iTunes 4.9.0.17 to verify my comments. (I love Hex Workshop!) I'll put some brief answers to these questions even if someone has already had a crack at it, just so that they're all gathered in one place. I'll add some technical discussion and tips for reducing the size of your Artwork-enabled MP3s at the bottom. The discussion here is *only* for MP3 files. AAC files are probably different but I don't use them so I haven't checked.

For the technically curious, I'll be making occasional references to the ID3 v2(.0.0) Standard (URL: www,id3.org/id3v2-00.txt) which Apple iTunes uses to write track metadata. Note that this is now a "deprecated" standard. New software (as of 2000) should be using the ID3v2.4.0 tag standard as published at ID3.org (URL: www,id3.org/develop.html).

Originally posted by jiminoc
I was curious if you select one jpg for your album art for 10 songs, does it store that artwork 10 times for each song or does it store just the one image and keep an index of what songs go to what art?

A copy of the artwork is stored inside *each* file. iTunes calls upon QuickTime to convert whatever images are supplied into PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format and saves the result of that into "PIC" frames inside the ID3v2 block at the start of the MP3 file.

Originally posted by jiminoc
If I drag and drop an image from amazon for album art, does itunes resize the image to the correct resolution or do I still need to make sure my images are 200x200 or something like that?

You can use whatever size artwork you want but if the artwork you supply is larger than 1,024 pixels in either dimension then the image will be scaled-down whilst maintaining the aspect ratio. A couple of examples:
1. A 2,048 x 2,048 image will be scaled-down to 1,024 x 1,024.
2. A 2,048 x 1,024 image will be scaled-down to 1,024 x 512.

Originally posted by recchi_8
seems like you could really waste some space with album art eh? :(

You betcha. For reasons I'll outline below JPEG files will cause the files to grow the most.

Originally posted by jiminoc
also, since the artwork binds itself to the song, will playing the mp3 in another non-ipod mp3 player still work?

Apple doesn't do anything strange here. Any MP3 player which properly understands ID3v2 chunks should work no problems. Note: It doesn't have to have a pretty colour screen to display or otherwise know what to do with Album Artwork ("PIC" tags), so long as it's ID3v2 compliant it can just skip over them.

Originally posted by dpodiluk
i just tried to add some art to an album on my iphoto. the art was 1024x1024 at about 380k, i scanned it myself. i checked the mp3 files on my ipod and they are all 380k bigger :( so with 12 song thats 4 megs wasted. is there a way to add art to ipod so it displays in now playing and not add it to the files?

i'd hate to resize them all 147x147 to save space, this will really suck for the 200+ albums i ripped.

With Apple currently using ID3v2(.0.0) to store the artwork there's no choice but to store a copy of the Album Artwork in each MP3 file (using a "PIC" frame). The ID3 tag version 2.3.0 standard (issued in 1999, URL: www,id3.org/id3v2.3.0.html) introduced support for external files using the "APIC" (Attached PICture) frame, so in future it might be possible for iTunes to support one copy of Album Artwork for all of the tracks on an album. Although there's a risk of file separation (i.e.: moving your MP3's without their images) hopefully Apple will stop dragging their heels and the next version of iTunes will support writing at-least ID3v2.3.0 files with external images via "APIC." *crosses fingers*

Originally posted by mrbranch
Question: How to remove album art per album then? or a playlist maybe?

In iTunes select the tracks you want to clean-up (or go into the Library and hit Ctrl+A to select all if you're keen) and then use Get Info (Ctrl+I) to view the selection's info - this will give you a "Multiple Song Information" dialog. To remove all of the Album Artwork go to the "Info" tab and tick the checkbox beside the "Artwork" thumbnail BUT DON'T SELECT ANY ARTWORK. Click OK and iTunes will go through removing artwork from the selected files. Update your iPod to complete the process.

Some tips for reducing the size of Album Art in your MP3 files:

TIP 1:
Avoid LOSSY graphics formats like JPEG.

Why:
iTunes uses QuickTime to convert whatever artwork you supply into loss-less PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format images before embedding them into your MP3 files. JPEG uses a lossy compression algorithm (DCT) which generates a lot of Quantization Noise - this frustrates the PNG loss-less encoder and can result in LARGER FILES.

Proof:
I started with an 8,480KB MP3 file which had no artwork and used a 1,638 x 1,410 24-bit scan of a CD cover. The majority of the background in this image was a fairly solid colour but for the scanner noise so it was cleaned-up in the Open-Source paint program "GIMP for Windows" (URL: gimp-win.sourceforge.net/) by performing a 5x5 Gaussian blur then using the Colour Picker to select that colour and Fill with a tolerance of 30. This reduced around 70% of the image to one uniform colour. The result was saved into three files:
1. A Windows Bitmap file, uncompressed, result 6,770KB.
2. A PNG file, Compression level 9, result 1,263KB.
3. A JPEG file, Quality 90 (the default is 85), result 244KB.

The JPEG file is clearly the smallest here, but look at what happens when I add these to the MP3 file (clearing the Album Artwork immediately beforehand):
1. the Windows Bitmap: 9,133KB. Increased by: 653KB.
2. the PNG: 9,133KB. Increased by: 653KB.
3. the JPEG: 9,261KB. Increased by: 781KB.

That's a 19% size penalty for using JPEG!

Workarounds:
1. Start with loss-less graphics formats like BMP, GIF (256 colour limitation), PNG, 24-bit PCX, TIFF/RLE or TIFF/LZW (TIFF/JFIF is essentially a JPEG, so avoid it like the plague) to name a few.
2. Use a Gaussian blur to reduce noise in your image and save it into a loss-less format before dropping it into iTunes.
3. Convert an image to "Indexed" palette (important: without dithering) and then back to RGB before saving it - this can give you a huge space saving for not much loss of quality. This only really works well for covers with few colours (ie: non-photographic).


TIP 2:
Use smaller artwork.

Why:
If you're primarily using an iPod to play music (as opposed to your desktop/notebook) it's only got a 220 x 176 screen (see Apple iPod technical specifications, URL: www,apple.com/ipod/color/specs.html). There's not much point in making images any larger than about 176 x 176 if that's all it can put on-screen - anything larger is wasted disk space and CPU power (and hence battery power to resize it for display).
If you're mainly using your desktop/notebook, make 'em as big as you want. :)

Workarounds:
1. Scale all of your images down to 200x200 or less. If you try anything larger than 1,024 x 1,024 then iTunes will scale it back for you anyways.

I hope this helps a few people out.

[scatterlined]

Very useful thread, a few more notes...

I looked at the artwork images that came with a couple of the tracks I purchased from the iTunes Music Store. The were 600x600, 72.0x72.0 Pixels Per Inch, 16.7 million colors (RGB, 32 bit), and in the PICT file formoat.

[LAPTOPODO]

Does .gif format doesn't works inside the Ipod? ....I had no problem with iTunes and gif format.

...

[baggss]

Originally posted by ocellnuri
I wish the iPod photo could just read artwork from the ID3 tag itself. Then I wouldn't have to use iTunes to manage my music just so I can get artwork to show up.

Works fine for me. I use MPFreaker to put the artwork on my tracks. They show up in iTunes and on my iPod when transfered. BTW, I also use MPFreaker with iTunes closed.

[thr33face]

is there any piece of software like 'mpfreaker' for windows, that offers me the same comfort?

would be nice to know, as i couldn't really find something that nice