Posts Tagged ‘iTunes’

Cover Flow is such a cool tool that missing album artwork in my library becomes a big drag.  Fortunately, it is really simple to find and add missing artwork in iTunes so your library can be complete and beautiful.

The easiest way to get missing artwork is to go up to the menu bar at the top of the screen and select Advanced>Get Album Artwork, then click the ‘Get Album Artwork’ button on the window that pops up.  Now, at the top of the iTunes screen, you’ll see a status of iTunes inventorying all the artwork and, hopefully, filling in the blanks.  This process is going to run for a few minutes and when it is done, you may get a screen that tells you that iTunes was unable to get some artwork.  If so, then you’ll need to find the appropriate art yourself and add it to iTunes.  Fortunately that’s a pretty easy process as well.

The first step to manually adding album artwork is to get the artwork you want for the album.  Amazon.com is a great resource for this.  Go to the site and search for your album in the Music section, when the search list comes back, select your album from the list by clicking on the album’s title.  When the album’s page comes up, you’ll notice an image of the album cover on the left side of the screen, sometimes this is accompanied by two or more smaller images below it.  These images are all different versions of the album cover/art; Amazon loaded the big one, and other Amazon customers have added the smaller ones.  Move your mouse over each of the smaller ones to determine which one you like best and select it by clicking it.

Once the larger size image has loaded, either in its own pop-window or in the same window you selected it from, control+click (right click) the image and select ‘Save Image As’ and save the image to your computer. 

A few notes on saving those images:  Firstly, I’d make a folder for them somewhere and put them all in one place instead of having artwork files strewn about the desktop or downloads folder.  I have a folder called Album Artwork inside my Music folder and I save them all there.  Secondly, RENAME THE FILE when you’re saving it!  The file name is going to be something lengthy and meaningless and, if you’re doing more than one album at a time, it will be difficult to know which file is which.

Once you’ve downloaded the artwork, go back to iTunes and select the song, or songs, you’re adding art to.  (Don’t forget about the Shift and Command keys for makng multiple selections.)  Once selected, choose File>Get Info (or Command+I) to bring up the info screen about the track(s).  (If you’ve selected multiple songs, you’re going to get a warning asking if you really want to change multiple tracks at the same time, sure we do!)  Now, look for the Artwork section, if you’ve only chosen one song, Artwork is the last tab across the top; go there, click the ADD button and add the file we just downloaded.  If you selected multiple tracks to add this art too, you’ll see the artwork well right there on the right side of the screen; double click in the well to add a new image.

Either way, the artwork is added to the file and will now show up in Cover Flow and on our iPod or iPhone!