Missing Album Covers

Hi, welcome to Apple Discussions.

*Why is artwork not showing on my iPod when it's there in iTunes?*
iTunes will display a cover in many of it's views provided at least one track from the album has embedded or downloaded artwork. The iPod appears to load only the artwork from the first track to create the cover flow and album views which means that it can sometimes fail to display art for albums even when you can see the art in iTunes. Further, when tracks are played on the iPod, artwork is displayed if and only if it exists for the currently playing track, so track one may show art while track two does not.

*How to find tracks without artwork*
To find all the tracks without artwork so that you can update them you can try http://www.stum.de/itunes-find-tracks-without-artwork/ for Windows or http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=trackswithoutartwork for Macs. Use Google, Amazon, Discogs etc. to locate relevant images. Ideally these should be square, 320x320 pixels or above and borderless to give the best results in the various menus.

I say 320x320 because I believe (from using TouchCopy) that it's the size used in the iPod cache so if you're going to crop or resize a smallish image you might as well work to that size. Otherwise 200x200 is probably a good minimum size. iTunes store art seems to be generally 600x600 which is probably a good maximum.

I've not, so far, been able to locate a script to automate the process of replicating art from a track that has it to other tracks of the same album without art (or work out how to write one) however if you have artwork for some tracks of an album, but not others, find the album in the main music folder, select a track with artwork, right-click (Control-Click for Macs) on the art & click copy, then select all the tracks of the album, use CTRL-I or Command-I to *Get Info* and then paste the image into the artwork box.

If your tracks are all artworked-up in iTunes you may need to remove & re-add them to the iPhone to get it to recognise the artwork. If that still doesn't work then you may need to wipe & reload the whole phone.

tt2

This sounds cool... I downloaded the script from dougscripts.com and put the files in a new Scripts folder as the instructions said, but I can't figure out how to get iTunes to find it. Any help?

Sorry, I've precious little regular contact with Macs. I suspect you run the script from the Finder but hopefully if you poke around Doug's site a little it will become clear...

tt2

Well I can run the script and got as far as being able to create a playlist of albums without artwork, but don't see how the script fetches the missing cover artwork.

Oh, it doesn't in & of itself. It just helps you concentrate your efforts on the tracks which still need attention. Sorry if it wasn't clear, but you'll still need to make use of image searches on the web or scan your original artwork.

tt2

OK. No sweat. I've already done the web searching and adding the album covers manually for some of my faves, but was hoping there might be a neat automated way.

Ther are probably other tools but I don't really explore the Mac ones. On a PC I sometimes use MediaMonkey which can often match albums to the Amazon database and update art & other tag data with a few clicks. Anything fully automatic will probably make too many errors so if you want perfection you'll need to put in the effort.

tt2