What is the official Album Art Size?

[dreamrider7]

Hi i use a 3rd party software called "Songbird" for my iPod and i also use a 3rd party software to fix my album art called "Tag&Rename", but i need to find out the official Album Art size on iTunes. (Example: 800x550) Does anyone know the official size?

[Galley]

600 x 600 is most common. AlbumArtExchange.com is a great source for high-quality artwork.

[dreamrider7]

thanks for your reply, i just looked up an album art that was 600x600, it seems like its the official size, I'm still doing research to see if i can find what it is for sure, and yea i know about that website it's awesome

[S2_Mac]

Not sure what you mean by "official size"... iTunes doesn't really care, nor does the tagging standard. IOW, you won't be hauled over by the Wrong Sized Album Art police for using a 200x200 72DPI image, nor for a 1250x1250 300DPI image ;-) The whole idea of "nnn by nnn" is misleading anyway... since it doesn't account for the resolution (the dots per inch).

Once a track has art, iTunes creates an optimized thumbnail of it and stores the thumb in the Local folder of the Album Artwork folder in your iTunes folder. These thumbs are what iTunes displays in Grid view, CoverFlow, transfers to the iPod (after more massaging), etc. (I think when you look at art in the Artwork pane of a single track's Get Info box that you're looking at a scaled-on-the-fly "original", and not the thumb.)

[Razor70]

S2 I think the OP was asking what size the Itunes store uses on theirs. I do believe 600 X 600 is the right size on these.

[S2_Mac]

Right; just trying to remind the web generation that pixel dimensions without the context of pixel density don't paint the whole picture (pun intended ;-). Kinda like talking bit rate without accounting for sample rate....

And since iTunes resamples everything anyway, it doesn't really matter what you start with (and, more to the point, iTunes doesn't really care).