The Complete Guide to Great Album Art

[Tack]

To me, album art is a big part of the iPod experience. Being able to skim through all of my albums, looking at the album art (instead of a generic placeholder icon), makes experiencing the music that more enjoyable. Plus, it helps keep my OCD in check.

I've spent lots of time finding album art, editing art, and uploading album art. I'd like to share the ways that I've found that work best, so that others can enjoy adding album art to their albums as well.

Before I begin, I want to state that this does not require any knowledge of high-end graphics programs. In fact, the only three programs we will use are:

1. A Web Browser (preferably Firefox)
2. Picasa 3 (a free download from Google)
3. MS Paint

I know the first thing that comes to mind will be: But iTunes downloads album art automatically. You are indeed correct. iTunes does download album art for albums it has in its database. But the last time I checked, iTunes doesn't imbed the art in the file. What I mean by this is once the file is removed from the computer, the album art doesn't go with it. Also, if the file is played in another compatible player, the album art isn't displayed since it was saved separately from the music file. Again, this was how it happened to me, which was the main reason I started on this quest of adding album art to all of my files. Also, iTunes doesn't have album art for every album, so you would need to manually add any album art it can't find.

The best source I've found for album art is AlbumArtExchange.com. This is the best place for very high quality album art that in most cases has been edited to fix the edges so that you don't get that small sliver of light color around the edges. Most of the album art is 600 x 600. This is big enough so that it gives good detail without small text being blurry, and is the same size that Apple uses for its album art (at least this appears to be the new standard - I have found songs I purchased long ago with smaller album art). If you don't have Picasa 3 installed, I highly recommend it. It is a very easy program to use, and with one click can make your album art go from bad to great.

The first step in adding album art is to find out which album don't have the album art imbedded. In iTunes, click on the heading Album when looking at your Music Library. This will sort all of your albums in ascending or descending alphabetical order. Right click on the first album listed and click Get Info. This brings up the information for this individual song file. Click on the last tab that says Artwork. If there is album art showing in this tab, and you are satisfied with it, then you can move on to the next file by clicking Next. If there are two album arts showing, then delete the one that looks the worst. There is no reason to have two different album arts for one song.

It's important to note: If you have more than one song for an album, and only one of those songs has album art, it will appear in the main album browser that all the songs has the album art imbedded. This is not necessarily the case. iTunes will look at all the album art for the same album by the same artist and use only one of those as the album art for all of the songs from that album. Again, this is only while browsing through the songs as you normally would when playing your music. Looking at the album art in each individual file is the only way to tell if that individual song has the album art imbedded. Another important note is that iTunes can't distinguish between different albums released as the same name by the same artist. For example, Seal released an album titled "Seal" in 1991, and another album titled "Seal" in 1994. These have two different album arts, but iTunes will only show one since it doesn't look at the date field to distinguish these. You'll need to rename the albums a little differently if you want the albums to show separately while browsing (although they will show the correct art when played on your iPod if the album art is imbedded in the file). I use "Seal [1991]" and "Seal [1994]" as ways to distinguish the two. If you already have album art for one of the songs on an album, and you are happy with it, then you can simply copy and paste that album art to the other songs on that album. Right click on the album art, click Copy, then go to the next song on that album, right click, and click Paste. You can also highlight multiple songs and do them all at once.

If album art is missing, the next step is to go find it. As mentioned before, AlbumArtExchange.com is the best place I've found for most of the popular albums. If you listen to an obscure artist, or if the album art isn't available at Album Art Exchange, then you'll need to go other places to find it. Image Search in Google is a good place to look. It also conveniently shows the dimensions for the picture file. You want to go with the best quality at the highest resolution. 300 x 300 is the minimum you want to go with, because anything less than that won't look as good as the same picture at a higher resolution. Amazon is another good place to look, since they allow customers to upload their own images and you might be able to find a really good version of album art that someone has uploaded. If the album is really old or you can't find it in other places, try MusicStack.com. This website is hit or miss, but I have found a fairly good version of an album I couldn't find any other place (including Google's Image Search). Album art found on MusicStack.com will almost always need editing, which we'll get to a little bit later. There are other places I've found that also provide album art, but 99.9% of the time, you'll be able to find every album art in the places mentioned above.

Once you found the album art you want, and it is perfectly square, you can simply drag it from your web browser into the Artwork tab in iTunes. Clicking on OK will imbed the artwork into the file. That's it. One file down, many more to go. But wait, why does it have to be perfectly square? If the album art isn't perfectly square, it won't look as nice when flipping through your album art in iTunes or on your iPod. When you flip through your albums, notice how the albums are all lined up on either side of the one being show in the middle. If the album isn't perfectly square, it won't line up as nice (it might be shorter than the one next to it). The album might show just fine when a song from that album is playing, but you might as well make it look the best you can if you are going through all the trouble to get the best album art available.

What if the album art isn't perfectly square, or it needs trimming to remove a sliver of white that runs around the edges, or it's too dark and needs to be lightened, or maybe it looks faded and needs to be darkened, or any number of other ways you think you can make it look better?

This is where Picasa comes in. A good feature about Picasa is that it has live updating. By this, I mean it will automatically look in a folder to see if a new picture file has been added. When you find the album art on the web, right click on it, click Save Image As..., and save it to whatever folder you have set up in Picasa to live update. I have mine set as my desktop. This makes finding the album art easy, and allows me to easily delete them when I'm done (since they are imbedded in the file, you won't need the album art anymore).

Once you have the file in Picasa, you simple need to click "I'm Feeling Lucky" under the Basic Fixes tab. In most cases, this will fix the album art so that it looks it's best. Note that it might not necessarily look just like it looks on the actual album, but it should look good enough for your purposes of adding it to iTunes. If you want it a little darker or lighter, or if I'm Feeling Lucky changed it too much for your tastes, then click on the Tuning tab. The first three sliders here will allow you to adjust the light areas and the dark areas. It's been my experience that most scans of album art appear washed out. I will almost always darken album art by sliding the Shadows slider a little to the right in order to make the darker colors look deeper. If there is light colored text on the album art, then slide the Highlights slider a little to the right in order for them to stand out more. Just trial and error these adjustments until you think the album art looks good.

Once you are done editing the album art, click on the Export folder down at the bottom. Under Image Size Options, change the "Resize to:" setting to 600. Change "Image Quality:" to Automatic. Click OK to export the file. A new window should pop up that shows the exported file (you might have to double click another folder to actually get to the exported file). Now all you simply need to do is drag and drop the file from the export folder to the Artwork tab of the file in iTunes, or to the Artwork box in the Multiple Items Information window if editing multiple files. Click OK and you are finished. One thing to note about the "Resize to:" setting when exporting a file: The album art will only be resized to 600 if the original picture file you are editing is higher than 600. If the resolution is lower than 600, then it will not adjust the resolution up. Also, if the picture file is not perfectly square, this will not fix the shorter side to make it longer. Only the longest side will be resized to 600 and the other size will still stay proportionally shorter.
There are two ways to fix album art that is not perfectly square. This first way is within Picasa. Let's use a picture that is 600 x 585 as an example. In Picasa, you can use the Crop function under the Basic Fixes tab. In the dropdown box, choose "Square: CD Cover". Draw the biggest box you can within the borders of your album art. This will trim off 15 pixels from the longest side, making the final dimensions of your album art 585 x 585. Click on Apply and then export the file as you normally would.

If you don't want the file to be 585 x 585, but rather 600 x 600, you can do this in MS Paint. Adjust the album art as described above so that it looks the way you want it to, and then export it. Once it is exported and shows up in the exported folder, right click on it and choose "Open With", and select MS Paint. Paint should open and the album art should be displayed. If you don't know whether the height (vertical) is longer or the width (horizontal) is longer, simply click on the Attributes option in the Image menu (keyboard shortcut Ctrl + E) . Once you know which one is shorter, click Resize/Skew (keyboard shortcut Ctrl + W) in the Image menu. At this point, it is a guessing game as to how much is needed to make the shorter side (the one that is 585) to match the longer side (the one that is 600). A little quick math can help. 600 minus 585 is 15. So take 15 and divide by 5.85 (which is the size of the shortest side with the decimal moved over two places). This gives us 2.56. We have to round this to a whole number, so we come up with 3. In the Resize/Skew window, we need to add 3 to the shorter side, making it a 103% increase in size. Once done, click on OK. To see the new size of your album art, go back to Image > Attributes (Ctrl + E). In this example, we end up with 600 x 602. Change the 602 to 600 and click OK. This will shave two pixels off this side, which in most cases won't be missed. Now we have our final album art at a nice 600 x 600. Do a Ctrl + A to select the album art, and then a Ctrl + C to copy it. Go over to iTunes, and paste it in the Artwork tab or Artwork box.

Paint can also be used to do other small adjustments to album art. If there is a small blemish on the album art, you can copy a small area of roughly the same color from a different part of the album art and paste it over the blemish. You can also use the Resize/Skew function along with the Attributes function to remove a discolored or a tiny white border on a black album. I won't take you through step by step how to do this, but you should be able to figure it out by trimming and resizing like we did above.

That's it. You now have an edited piece of album art that looks great because you adjusted the colors and/or shading, and you made it perfectly square so that it looks great while browsing through you albums.

This might seem like a long complicated process, but it really goes by fast once you get the hang of it. Fortunately, the editing part won't be applicable if you are able to find the album art that looks great already and is sized properly.

I hope everyone enjoyed this tutorial and will gladly answer any questions anyone has about this.

-Tack

[bwaldron]

If you are using Windows, Album Art Downloader is a great free app that searches multiple sources of artwork for you (including the Album Art Exchange you mentioned).

[S2_Mac]

A few thoughts --

iTunes downloads album art automatically...But...iTunes doesn't imbed the art in the file.
For those who prefer the convenience of letting iTunes download album art, there are scripts that will embed the art. Here's one for Windows; here's another (halfway down the page, "itunes_insert_artwork". Here's one for Macs.

The first step in adding album art is to find out which album don't have the album art imbedded....
Scripts can help here, too -- No-Art playlist for Windows; No-Art playlist for Macs.

Or, to make by-hand work a little easier, create an Artless playlist, switch to Grid view - by Albums, and drag icons with no art onto the playlist; every track in the album will be added to the playlist.

There is no reason to have two different album arts for one song.
Well, if you're printing a CD case insert for an album using the "Mosaic" format, having multiple arts makes for a much better looking mosaic ;-)

[DCSmith]

Tack

Thanks a lot for that, two questions

You told about how you can drag the art from the browser to the Artwork tab of the Get Info box that comes up. But lets say you have an entire album that needs the same art. Can you select the entire set of songs somehow and drag it over to them all ? Or do you have to go one by one for each song ?

And the most important question, for me. I have My entire mp3 library backed up, like everyone, I guess. After I did this, I looked in the dir containing the songs I just added to album art to, and did not see any new files containing the art. My question is, will this remain in the songs if I have a problem with my iPod and have to erase it and reinstall everything ? Or get a new iPod, and want to install all my songs to it, like if I bought a bigger one ? Would I have to back up some other part of the ITunes system in addition to the songs in my library to make it work that way ? I am happy to go through and add all the artwork - but I want to be sure it will remain in the future, and not just be for this install on this iPod. How can I so that ?

[Galley]

Yes, you can select all tracks from an entire album and add artwork to all of them at once.

[S2_Mac]

The methods described here are for embedding artwork into the music files. That is, the artwork becomes part of the file, just as Name and Artist and Album tags are part of the file. (To verify this, pick a music file to add art to; make a note of the file's size and modified date. Now add some art to the file by dropping/pasting/Add-ing a picture via iTunes Get Info box. Now check the file again -- its modified date will be changed and the file size will be larger than before.)

When you download art from the iTunes Store, that artwork is not automatically embedded in a file. If something messes up your iTunes, that art is gone. (But, as noted in my first post, there are scripts which can easily perform the task of embedding Store art right in the files.)

Regardless of your art situation, you should always be backing up two things in iTunes: your "content files" (music, movies, podcasts, etc.) and your "content management" files (iTunes Library and other index files, which store your playlists, ratings, playcounts, etc.). You always want to back up your "iTunes" folder, which contains all the "content manageent" stuff. If your music files are stored somewhere other than the default location of the "iTunes Music" folder inside the "iTunes" folder, you'll need to back that up as well.

[Code Monkey]

FYI, embedding iTunes downloaded art is as simple as right clicking the album art panel on the left, copying, right clicking again and pasting.

[Peter Sherman]

As to sources for album art, I just want to add a shout out to Rate Your Music (www.rateyourmusic.com). This is the single best site I've found for obscure artwork, especially for 45s, EPs, etc.

Many of the songs in my iTunes library were originally released during the 50s and 60s on singles, EPs, etc. I've organized my library based on that (track info, dates, etc.) and, even though the import source might have been a greatest hits CD or other collection, what I really want in my artwork is an image of the original release.

A lot of the artwork in my library isn't even really artwork. So many of the greatest songs of the 50s & 60s were released on 45s packaged in nothing more than a paper sleeve with maybe some record-company advertising and a cut-out to show the actual label of the disc. If that's the way it was originally issued, that's what I want the artwork to show. There are many fascinating tidbits of cultural history reflected in the packaging, or lack of packaging, of the music that was released during this era (and others).

Most people probably don't have this particular obsession, but for anyone who does, you will have a ball at RYM.

Also, there's another reason why some folks might want to have multiple pieces of artwork for some songs. If you have the collector's mindset, you might want to have separate artwork for the British release, the American release, overseas releases, etc. A lot of music has been released in different markets with different packaging, and it can be fascinating to see how these differ, not just over time, but from country to country.

Even though I'm not going to that length myself, RYM has a great catalog of artwork from different releases in different countries.

Thanks for some great information in this thread.

Peter Sherman