Album art not showing on iPhone

I ran into this problem today. Not all of my album art disappeared, but I am missing quite a few. I bought an album on iTunes (50 Cent's Before I Self Destruct), and suddenly, I was missing several album covers. They show up in iTunes without a problem, and they actually show up on my iPhone when I'm playing a song from one of the albums in question, but when I'm looking at the album in list view, the artwork isn't there.

In iTunes select the songs that are missing art work on your phone, use the "get info" option to bring up the Tags of the song and paste an image of the artwork into the artwork tab.
iTunes stores the artwork info in a hidden file on your computer. In itunes when you play a song, the artwork comes up. On your phone, this hidden file doesn't exist, hence the missing artwork. If you paste the artwork as I suggest, it will be carried to your phone. Using find artwork does not work to well in this regard.

Hey wjosten, thanks for the advice.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. I've been seeing that solution around online, but that's not the issue I'm having. I'm extraordinarily anal with my music. All the individual files have the artwork associated with them. This has never been a problem before. I've always seen all of the artwork for every song I've owned until today, when I downloaded the 50 Cent LP and synced it with my phone. Now I'm "missing" artwork for Coldplay, Nas, Jason Mraz, coincidentally, 50 Cent, and just a couple others. Like I said, the album artwork is only missing when I'm looking at the album in list view. But when I actually play the album, the artwork is there as if nothing is wrong. In list view, it isn't the default artwork image that appears (musical note). It's just white space.

You don't have the same problem, in fact you don't have a problem at all. There is no album artwork display in list view. Unless you select "more". It only displays there.

Perhaps I misunderstood you, are you saying when you select more, there is no artwork? If that's the case, it should be displayed.

What I mean is this: http://rockmeamadeo.com/personal/photo.jpg

For whatever reason, a few of my albums are no longer showing the album art when I'm looking at my music in list view. The only time the album artwork isn't shown is when you're looking at it too high level (like when you're sorting by artists, and you haven't drilled down to a specific artist) or when you've already drilled down to the specific album. But when you're sorting by album, or when you're looking at the albums by a specific artist, the album artwork is shown.

When I go into Coverflow they're there, but not when I'm in list view. I have no idea why it's doing this. Nothing has changed since yesterday other than me downloading that one album, which I would find surprising if it was a catalyst for all this.

Message was edited by: AmadeoPlaza

Message was edited by: AmadeoPlaza

I am having a similar problem. I have over 40 GB of music in my iTunes library, all of it meticulously tagged, with an album image associated with each individual song. In iTunes, every single album in coverflow appears correctly.

On my iPod Touch (the most recent revision, latest software), I have about 28 GB worth of music. Only about 10 percent of the album covers appear. I haven't tested this thoroughly, but here is what I suspect is going on:

I did not use any automated tools for populating the album art, as I was generally unsatisfied with the results, and manually searched for each album cover, always picking the highest quality image available. This was typically images over 500x500 pixels, some of them over 1000x1000. I don't think the iPhone/iPod Touch will display album art over a certain resolution.

My guess is the only solution is to replace the offending artwork with smaller images, or wait for a future iPod/iPhone update that supports large images. I worked too **** hard getting all that artwork to lower the quality now, so I'll be going for the latter, unless someone else has a better insight than me to this problem.

Yeah, I really doubt that image quality has to do with it. Because the artwork that iTunes provides, when you use the "Get album artwork" feature to fill in album art, is always very high quality. I typically use iTunes to fill in my artwork, or I go off and find my own when they can't fill it in. But it's never been a problem until now. So I don't think the album artwork size/quality is the culprit here.

Album art went haywire after iPhone 3.1. No one on the boards has yet found a solution unfortunately.

Please post your feedback/issue here so that developers will know to fix it: http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html. Hopefully as more people notify them of the problem, they will prioritize fixing it.

I actually got mine working. I basically had my iTunes re-sync everything and the album art went along with them when it went through.

Can you be more specific what you mean by re-sync?

I removed all my music and put music back on and the issue was not solved.

Well, specifically, it started when I decided (in no way related to this problem) to rename one of the genres in my library (Rap/Hip-Hop to Hip-Hop/Rap). After I did that, and synced my iPhone so the genre changes would be reflected on my phone, I realized that the albums within the Hip-Hop/Rap genre that had missing artwork, was showing up.

I tried to experiment by going to the albums in R&B and Alternative that had the missing artwork problem, and tried changing the genre to Unknown, and changing it back, then syncing. That didn't work, however. So, I changed the genre again, and unchecked the albums so they wouldn't sync (I have my iTunes setup so only checked songs sync). I synced my phone so the albums were removed from my phone all together. I changed the genre back to their proper genres, re-checked the albums, and then synced. Lo and behold, the albums were on my iPhone with the proper artwork.

I don't know why, but it worked. It sounds like you did everything I did, short of changing the genre, and I'd be surprised if that solved the issue. But you can give it a shot. If you look at my earlier posts, however, my problem wasn't exactly common.

I tried "de-syncing" and re-syncing as you suggested before (without changing any ID3 information (genre, etc.) Maybe it's worth another try, as I did notice that NEW things I sync show up correctly.

Seems somewhat ridiculous to have to do, but it's been driving me nuts for a month now as I'm fanatical about my album art.

Thanks for the detailed response; greatly appreciated! 🙂