How to Add Album Art in iTunes
Why import album artwork?
One of the biggest pet peeves of important music into iTunes is that album artwork is often forgotten. Before iTunes, sharing music never included file lists or artwork. It was simply the music files in a format you could use on your computer. Now, however, thanks to iTunes, you can share so much more on your iPod, computer or over a network.
Where to Find Artwork
How to add album artwork
There are two ways to add album artwork in iTunes. You can have iTunes use the Music Store to search for the corresponding album artwork for missing titles, or you can import it yourself. While allowing iTunes to do it for you sounds like the easy way out, it does not always prove to be the most effective method.
Many times, iTunes cannot find the right artwork thanks to mistagged songs and albums. If you do not label your music as meticulously as iTunes demands, the Music Store will not find the artwork, and it will go missing. This is where adding it yourself comes in handy.
How to find artwork
All you have to do is find the artwork you want to use, select the songs you want it to represent, and then drag it into the program. iTunes will then import the artwork, associate it with those songs, and even transfer it to your iPod if it is connected. It only takes a few seconds, and the hard part is finding the right artwork you want for your album or songs. You can even create your own if you want.
Comments
dude it would not accept the image. IS ther a format?
JPG ?
Tim:
You can use JPG or PNG for high-quality image files and GIF for lower-quality images.
hostyle,
iTunes does not embed the artwork into the music file. It saves it to a folder called "artwork" within the iTunes folder and then references the artwork via internal database. Good question. :)
I don't get any of the cover art when I dowload my cd in my windows vista laptop itunes library. Please help
I live in singapore and it like says it cant get artwork whenever i click on get album artwork, i found this thing where you can get artwork for a song and then that shows up on your computer as the album artwork but on my ipod it doesnt. can you PLEASE help me
When I drag my picture into itunes it just bounces back??? I don't undertsand! PLEAS HELP ME!!!
same as molly!!!! HELP!
This doesn't work. You cannot drag and drop artwork onto Itunes.
Kelvin:
I do it every time I add a new album or song to my iPod.
Here's a tip to dragging artwork into iTunes. Select the song you want, then play it, then drag the art work into the iTunes window on the song playing.
Then the artwork should appear.
I hope this helps.
If you want to add artwork that you made yourself to a song, save the artwork as .jpg (other formats may work, but I used .jpg) and then right click on the song that you want the artwork for. After right-clicking, click "Get Info". Then click "Artwork". Click "Add" then find the artwork file yuo made, then click "save". Voila! Instant artwork :)
If you can't add art work after doing all these things try this - works every time. Right click on song or songs you want to add artwork and convert to AAC version. This will creat an AAC version of whichever songs you select - you will now have two versions. At this point you can add artwork by any of the methods mentioned here. Yes, you can just drag it to the artwork box, you can add via Get Info, you can add to multiple selections, etc. They will all now work. Sometimes iTunes does not convert the audio file to AAC version and sometimes because of this you can't add artwork. After you do this you will have two copies of everything. Just delete whicever one you don't want. The AAC version will be listed second.
what do you do if you dragged one, and it turned out to be bad quality, so you just dragged another on top of it? now, it keeps reverting back to the bad quality one, but i can click an arrow where it says selected item and it will go to the right one, but it doesn't stay there
Thanks Alex vdv, you got it spot on.
So long as you use the slider to adjust the size of the alum cover picture so it matches the size itunes likes. I had to move the slider back 3 'notches' before it itunes accepted it and added it as the album cover.
At the bottom of iTunes there is a little triangle on a box, click that box and in the bottom lefthand corner there should be a spot that says drag art work here
thank you everyone!!!!!
THANK U OLIVER K!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
kj7r got it right, in order for those methods to work you must first create an AAC version of the song. For those not able to add artwork by clicking "get info", first create an AAC version of the song, then you can add artwork.
The "little triangle in a box" is the only method that worked for me for files that were autoconverted from WMA to M4A format. All other methods mentioned showed as if they would copy, but then nothing would happen.
Thanks!
S
hostyle 4 years ago
Hi. You don't state whether the second mathod embeds the artwork into the actual music data file, OR saves it to your library and merely references it in the internal XML database. I'm looking for a way to do the latter. The former causes problems if you also play your music in players that are not itunes (ie. mpg123 on linux).