How much space does album artwork take up?

I cant be of much use but i do know that if you save the image to your computer and look at the size of the file and the pixels, the ipod changes the pixels to the screen size therefore making the album art size smaller. this is also the same with pictures.

I did a test on this several months ago, by attaching the same artwork at different resolutions. The result is that the .jpg file is added into the the .mp4 file as is - no compression on the data seems to be going on, judging from the differences in file sizes. There is definitely good reason to keep your artwork small, but not so small that the iPod has to upsample it to display (you'll get a blurry/pixellated image in that case). I keep mine all at 180x180. Since the new video iPod has 240 lines, it may be good to go a little higher. But some images you get off the web are big (and have other problems as well), so using automatic artwork loaders will work against you in this case. Personally, I don't mind spending a minute or so (while the CD imports) to clean up the image before I add it to the songs.

As Dave indicated, it depends on the artwork and where you obtain it.

I found that allmusic.com has most every album cover available and at a 200x200 size (usually). The file size of the jpg is between 5-15KB. Reasonably small to add to each song file.

Other sites have artwork that has been 50-500KB in size. I needed to resize them to reduce overhead.

There are many choices out there. Pick your poison.

Great link to allmusic.com! Thanks. I have also used amazon.com for a lot of my album art. They are a good source of cheap CD's and then they have the art for when I save the CD to my iTunes and then to my iPod.