Album Art takes up too much memory?

There's a copy of the image for each song because the art image is a property of the song, and iTunes is saving it within the song file. The only concepts of an "album" in iTunes are (a) songs having the same album listed in their metadata; and (b) if the songs are organized by iTunes, songs from the same album are in the same directory. So there's really no way to save the images once per album.

If you're seeing some JPEG files in your library -- iTunes didn't do that and won't be using them for anything. Which means, for starters, you can delete those files to recover space, and if you're no longer using whatever put them there, you won't miss them.

Joanna:

Freelancer is 100% correct. Music files have the ability to store data about themselves in "ID3" tags. The latest format - ID3 v.2.x can save up to a whopping 256 megabytes of data per song JUST for the album art tag (source: ID3v2 Made Easy).

While it may seem inefficient, it isn't - music files are not album based. Each song or track is it's own data file. It is possible, in the future, that there will be an option to have a separate data file for an album, thus eliminating the need to save identical tags across multiple files, I don't know if it will ever be implemented.

The trick is to avoid using large image files. If you want album art because you want to display it in the now playing box in iTunes, or on a color iPod, you should look for art that is no bigger than 300 x 300 pixels. Also, avoid hi-res images, which will bloat your song files.

I've been collecting album art for a few years now, and I have found that Clutter, FetchArt and Sofa (and any other automated art retriever) don't give me the level of control that I prefer. They all rely on the artwork available from Amazon's vast catalog, but if Amazon's images aren't good, then you are stuck. I have manually added art to nearly every track by using the Find Album Artwork with Google, which initiates a search of the Google Images search engine using the artist and album name. If nothing is available in Google Images, then the main Google search engine is only a click away. One of the advantages to using Google Images is that you can see the size of the image in both pixels and kilobytes - and you have the option of choosing the best image in both quality and size.

If you are still looking for a way to reduce the size of your music files, try converting the ID3 tags from v2 to v1. Version 1 does not include a tag for album art - and allows only a maximum of 30 charactes per field. To do this, select your files, and from the Advanced Menu, select Convert ID3 Tags, then select v1.

I hope this helps you.

Lita

Considering the size of my music library, that's one **** of a job!

What, deleting the obsolete JPEG files? Nah. Open a Terminal window, and do this (assuming your iTunes library is where mine is; if not, substitute the proper directory path):

<pre>cd ~/Music/iTunes
find . -name '*.jpg' -print0 | xargs -0 rm</pre>

If you're not familiar with using Terminal, note that the above must be entered exactly, character-for-character, and the second line in particular has some tricky bits. You can just paste it in. But make sure you do the first one first, or you'll delete any JPEG files in your entire home directory! 🙂

Freelancer:

For us Terminal-impaired, is there any difference between your process selecting the entire Library, then Get Info and ticking the Album Art box in the multiple track Get Info pane, then closing? Won't this delete all of the artwork in on fell swoop, or will it leave artefacts behind?

Lita

is there any difference between your process selecting the entire Library, then Get Info and ticking the Album Art box in the multiple track Get Info pane,

Completely different -- exact opposite, in fact. He had actual, discrete JPEG files sitting in his iTunes library directories, evidently old files placed there by another application from back before iTunes did art. My command line example will delete those but preserve all the embedded album art images in the library.

To remove the embedded images, my command line will not work -- you would do it the way you suggest.

Freelancer:

Thanks - I hadn't realized the distinction.

Best,

Lita

I'm a she :$

Bah, sorry! Female name and everything. That'll teach me about making assumptions!

Joanna, what you want - a single picture, or suite of pictures to be shared through the constituent tracks of an album - is supported by the id3 spec for mp3 files, but it isn't supported by iTunes/iPod/Apple. m4a files carry information in metadata atoms, and no spec other than what Apple decides to support exists - and it doesn't support this method currently.

For id3 tags, the spec says that if the picture has a mime-type of "-->" (as opposed to "image/jpg" or "image/png"), then it can be used exactly how you want - to carry an internet URL: "http:www.joanna.com/pix/pic1.jpg" or a local file reference: "../../pix/pic_something.png". As I said however, nothing that has an Apple logo on it supports this.
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Further, as discussed here, m4a files are even worse off with iTunes that you would suspect:

m.holmes, "Album Artwork size increase (Automatic PNG?)", 04:16am Aug 19, 2005 CDT

where we tested out that most jpegs get upconverted to png pictures and balloon in size.

For id3 tags, the spec says that if the picture has a mime-type of "-->" (as opposed to "image/jpg" or "image/png"), then it can be used exactly how you want - to carry an internet URL: "http:www.joanna.com/pix/pic1.jpg" or a local file reference: "../../pix/pic_something.png".

That would be a nightmare to support... what happens when one file has its art pointing to a second file, and that second file moves or is deleted?