To Clarify: iTunes 7 ALBUM ARTWORK Issues...

[beatmixer]

Great info. I've been beating my head against the wall trying to get my artwork to update. I'm going to try some of the ideas here. Hope it works. I have a huge library on my 5G and a lot of them are missing the art. I'm hoping this will update the artwork that sits in the album folders.
Wish me luck.

[mxwlhaus]

Greetings, Loungers!

During the upgrade process, Win7 strongly suggested that I uninstall iTunes and then reinstall after the upgrade. I did so and now have the latest version of iTunes (9.0.2.25)

And I see that some of my artwork is missing. I have over the years laboriously found artwork for those tracks and albums that did not automagically download. My habit has been to select the tracks, get info, and paste the image into the artwork box.

I see two different varieties of the missing artwork issue now, each with their own problems:

1. Albums for which the artwork is available through the iTunes store. I just sign in and then tell iTunes to get album artwork. Fine - but didn't I already do that long ago? What did I do wrong along the way that I now have to redo this step - and what about those albums where I manually added a better/different image than the one the iTunes store sent me. I have a large collection (225GB) and my memory is foggy, but I know I have albums where this was the case - and now i will slowly rediscover those poor quality or wrong images and then try to remember where i found one i prefer, etc.

2. Albums or Tracks for which there is nothing in the iTunes store. Example is a home recording of a piano recital for which i paste in my own artwork. Where did that image go?

I recall that in the past i have avoided upgrading iTunes because i was nervous about just this sort of episode. Now here I am.

Is there a definitive approach I should have been or should be taking to avoid this problem in the future?

Thoughts?

[lovetoflyfish]

I'm a relative "Newbie" running iTunes 9 on a Laptop w/Windows 7.

I am able to add artwork for audiobooks in iTunes (Right Click file, Get Info, Artwork...) but this option (tab) does not seem to be available in the Music section of the Library.

Am I wrong?

Why would this option be missing?

Is it to "force/persuade" people to utilize iTunes to purchase all of their music?

Note that I have tried the option of Right-clicking the file and selecting "Get Album Artwork" but nothing seems to happen.

Thanks for any help, L

[Jesse Hollington]

Hi and welcome to iLounge.

The "Artwork" tab under "Get Info" should be available pretty much everywhere -- even iPhone apps display this tab -- so I'm not sure why you're not seeing it for your Music. Note that the 'Artwork' tab isn't the only way to add artwork -- you can also display an artwork panel in the bottom-left corner of the screen and drag-and-drop your album art into there.

It's definitely not about trying to force people into buying music from iTunes. In fact, you can use iTunes itself now to "Get Album Artwork" for you automatically for any tracks in your library that also happen to be available from iTunes, regardless of whether your tracks were purchased from there. You need to have an iTunes Store account to do this, but otherwise it's completely free.

See our Guide to Album Tagging, Art and Playlists for more information.

[raff]

Let's see if I got this right.
I have two questions.

I was wondering what happens to songs with NO album art embedded, when they are transferred to ipod.
Does it work as in iTunes storing just one copy of the album art somewhere in the ipod?

I have all my album art embedded but files in the iPod_Control\Artwork folder are pretty large anyway. I guess it makes a copy there, even if the album art is embedded in the song. Am I right?
So on the ipod there's a copy of the album art embedded in the file and a cached one in the artwork folder?

thanks!

[Jesse Hollington]

The short answer is yes.

The iPod does not read the album artwork from the files directly, regardless of whether it's in there or not. This is presumably for performance reasons, as the artwork in the tag could be any size and one of several formats. Click-Wheel iPods would have limited horsepower to convert and display artwork from right within the tags.

Instead, they rely on iTunes to do the heavy lifting of converting the artwork. The files are converted by iTunes into uncompressed bitmaps in proper resolutions for the particular model of iPod being used (see this thread for more information). The iPod itself then simply has to read the raw bits from the database in order to display album artwork. High-capacity, hard-drive based iPods like the classic can be sluggish even reading the artwork in this manner, so you can imagine how slow it would get if they actually had to dig into the file and rescale whatever they found there.

Essentially, the iPod ignores any artwork within the file itself, however iTunes doesn't strip the artwork out when storing the file on your iPod either. Although that costs a bit of space per file, it's not entirely a bad thing, since that means that the artwork is still embedded in the files should you ever need to restore your music from your iPod.

Keep in mind as well that the artwork embedded in the files should normally be smaller than the artwork stored in the Artwork folder on the iPod. iTunes stores multiple copies, and they're all uncompressed bitmaps in specific resolutions. The artwork in the tags will usually be a compressed JPG, and unless you've been adding extremely high-res artwork to your tracks, should normally only add about 40kb or so per track.

[raff]

Thank you! quick and very good question...very specific!

Originally Posted by jhollington

Click-Wheel iPods would have limited horsepower to convert and display artwork from right within the tags.
...
High-capacity, hard-drive based iPods like the classic can be sluggish even reading the artwork in this manner...

Unfortunately that's very true! I have an ipod classic 80gb and most of the times coverflow is not smooth at all.

Originally Posted by jhollington

The artwork in the tags will usually be a compressed JPG, and unless you've been adding extremely high-res artwork to your tracks, should normally only add about 40kb or so per track.

Yes I try to keep it around 50kB.

Thanks for the link to the other thread: it's very useful, but I still have a question.
I don't use the photo feature on my ipod very much. I just have one jpg and 15 gif which take up 2.29mb on my pc all together. On the other hand, when I open itunes, it tells me I have 13.1mb used for photos on my ipod. And I don't even have the option to include full resolution checked. It doesn't sound good to me, but that's probably the way it should be because of all the different thumbnails/resolutions stored.

Thanks again!

Raf

[Jesse Hollington]

Yup, that's essentially it. While it doesn't affect most users, the fact that files are resized to specific resolutions actually means that smaller images may in fact be scaled up, and of course everything is stored uncompressed, which doesn't help either.

Basically, as the charts in the other thread illustrate, each image, regardless of original size, takes a fixed amount of space once it's "optimized" and transferred to the iPod.

[raff]

Originally Posted by jhollington

Basically, as the charts in the other thread illustrate, each image, regardless of original size, takes a fixed amount of space once it's "optimized" and transferred to the iPod.

When 2.29mb on pc become 13.1mb on ipod, it's hard to speak about optimizing, but I understand what you mean.
But I like my subway map made up of 15 GIFs though.

Thanks again, now everything is a lot more clear!

Raf

[Jesse Hollington]

Yeah, hence my use of quotes around the word "optimized" in my last post

To be fair, however, I suppose it is optimized for display on the iPod (all the right resolutions and so forth), and the truth is that for most actual photos, the sizes will be at least a bit smaller, even with up to four different-sized copies of the image stored.

BTW, you'll also find that iTunes keeps an "iPod Photo Cache" folder on-hand on your computer. For 13.1MB you probably don't care, but if you're ever loading a lot of photos it's something to be aware of -- an optimized copy of every photo loaded onto your iPod is also kept in a cache folder on your computer.

[jnnewyork]

I had used itunes for years. the art work (pictures) of albums were always displayed on the screen my library. But, I must have pressed some button while I was updating, and now all I see is the same icon for each album. I can't find a way to get back to seeing the list of each song and artwork of the albums. One of the suggestions I saw is to get to itunes store (I have never bought anything from the itunes store, i have my own collecton of music) so I opened up an account there to see if this would work but this doesn't work in my account, maybe i did something else wrong .

This seems to be such an easy thing to do and display the albums on the list, like it used to be, but I am stuck with seeing only the icon over and over.

I would appreciate help!! Thanks