iTunes Album Artwork cache

The download folder holds images that have been downloaded from the iTunes store and associated with various files on your computer. Depending on how you embedded the images into your MP3's these might be in addition or you may be mistake in your belief that all your files have embedded images. If you delete the download folder any files whose image comes solely from the download folder will lose its artwork, however this can always be reacquired.

The cache folder is just that, a cache. If you delete this folder iTunes will rebuild it as and when necessary as it tries to display art for your various albums.

Very occasionaly these caches may become corrupt and removing them is the way to rebuild them. I've no idea how efficent iTunes is at garbage collection, so it is also possible that over time there could be redundant information held therein. Again, deleting the folders would result in them being rebuilt from scratch but if you are concerned they might be taking up too much room you can always delete and see what happens. How big is your media folder? Size and quality will have a bearing on how much memory the cache requires but I get an overhead of about 0.5% for my artwork folder, so a 500mb artwork cache would suggest your library is around 100Gb.

tt2

The two should be independent - consolidating makes copies of any files that are outside of your iTunes Media folders inside your iTunes Media folders. If space is an issue then consolidating will only make matters worse.

This script should embed any downloaded art into the tags, which means you could then afford to delete the cache safe in the knowledge that you won't lose any images.

tt2

You'd only need to keep those if you wanted to maintain an option to downgrade iTunes at some point. You should however maintain a backup of your current *iTunes Libraray* file and ideally all of your media, certainly anything that you can't re-rip from CD.

tt2

It's about 20GB, that's why I'm a bit concerned about a 500MB Album Artwork cache...

If you embed the artwork into each song file, then when iTunes rebuilds the cache, it will use the artwork embedded in each song, even if it's the same picture for all songs on an album.
Depending on the size of the picture you embed in the song file, the artwork cache will grow that much larger.

Because sometimes people discover they don't like new features or believe that downgrading will cure some problem they curently have and can't wait for a possible fix in the next build. Each library file is tagged with the version that created it and they're not backwards compatible. If you're happy with the current version of iTunes then feel free to throw away the old libraries.

tt2

Chris CA wrote:

It's about 20GB, that's why I'm a bit concerned about a 500MB Album Artwork cache...

If you embed the artwork into each song file, then when iTunes rebuilds the cache, it will use the artwork embedded in each song, even if it's the same picture for all songs on an album.
Depending on the size of the picture you embed in the song file, the artwork cache will grow that much larger.

Sure, but my figures were still based on fully embedded artwork, albeit some at 200x200 from my days using Windows Media Player. I guess if the OP deletes just the "cache" folder and then scans through the library in grid mode to force the images to be re-cached they can see if there's any significant difference in size before & after without disturbing store downloaded images .

tt2