How to change album cover on Apple Music

I have about 200 gb of music on my phone. The thought of deleting it all to compensate for something that Apple really should take the time to figure out is enough to make me nauseous. There's got to be a way to get iTunes to do its job without deleting everything. :-(

“There's got to be a way to get iTunes to do its job without deleting everything. :-(“

This operation takes roughly 5 minutes on my iPhone, at ~100+ g of music.

I even did it a couple of times in a row to confirm all my steps.

Yes, shouldn’t be happening, agreed. This is a hack, agreed. But I’d rather just do it and move on to eating pie. ;)

(Host Mac: M1 MBP running 11.4; iPhone 12: iOS 14.6)

Glad I found this thread. Bought an iPhone 12 mini recently and just today, I was out on the road when I noticed an album was missing. Entirely missing - no songs, no art, just >poof< gone. The iPhone had over 90GB unused. No way to be sure if it was the only missing album. I just waited to get home and sync. Once home, I confirmed that the album was still on my Mac's Library. The sync successfully copied the missing album to the iPhone - but afterwards, about one out of three of all my albums had some other album's cover art. The host Mac's cover art associations appeared to still be correct. I turned off music syncing for the iPhone, re-sync'd to remove all music, then re-checked the box to sync music and left for dinner. When I got back, the sync was done and some random sampling failed to find any remaining mismatched cover art. So.. just wipe it clean, then re-sync. I recommend doing this before bedtime, esp. if you have a large library and don't want to do without your phone while it copies.

Had this exact problem. Have had iPhone 12 for 2 months, and finally synced it with USB cord to update a few playlists. After, half the songs had the wrong music album covers. 4 hrs of Apple online tech support and phone call later (after updating to Big Sur 11.4), tech help amounted to: delete all your music from phone, attempt sync again (this is for 17GB of music). Ended tech support and did the following solo: first, backup your library & playlists on an external drive and export your playlists just in case something goes wrong. If you have thousands of songs on playlists (some from old CDs, too) like I do, just do this step for peace of mind. Second, with the phone not connected to your computer, get rid of all the music on your phone: go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Music and swipe on All Songs and hit Delete. Then go to the Music app and delete all the playlists, so you see no songs or playlists when you're done. Connect you phone to your computer, and uncheck Sync Music. Sync your phone to confirm that there are no songs or playlists that are synchronizing. Check Sync Music, and test one playlist to make sure it works. If it does, sync the rest. If anything goes wrong during this process, no worries, you have your backup music/playlists on the external drive. Note: upgrading to Big Sur likely had no effect on this issue and was an unnecessary step, because the problem persisted afterward. My guess is that there is a database issue between my old phone, new phone, and iTunes, so that the problem only showed up once I tried to sync the new phone to my laptop. If that's the case, the problem has to be fixed by Apple to avoid the issue altogether.

I tried the fixes mentioned here and STILL I have album covers that are mixed up. And it's MUCH worse now. I would say the majority of songs show the wrong album covers. I used the method of stop syncing with iTunes (Music is the name now), sync, deleting all music from iPhone, and then start syncing music again from iTunes. What a pain. This is 2021. How many years has Apple had to work on iTunes syncing with iPhone and still has problems like this? I'll note that I have made metadata changes outside of iTunes including album covers but you'd think iTunes would simply pick up those changes fine. And I NEVER let iTunes organize my music and I'm certainly NOT going to let iTunes "Automatically update artwork" after I've done a huge amount of that myself. This is ridiculous. And I just started using apple CarPlay for the first time, and album covers show up wrong there too. I haven't found anything wrong yet in iTunes on Mac. Why the heck is it wrong on the iPhone. My setting is 'sync all music'.

This same folder that's on my Mac has been copied to other storage for use on Android devices and at least two different android music players on those devices show the album art cover correctly.

I tried again, this time rebooting my phone after deleting all songs (and then setting up to sync again with iTunes). So far so good. All songs I've checked so far including ones that had wrong album art before have the correct album covers.

Ugh, what a nightmare. Huge library here, ripped from CDs, downloaded from the iTunes store and other outlets over many, many years. "Upgraded" my phone from 10 to 12 pro, and now this. Initial transfer from old phone to new was fine, but once I started syncing with my MacBook the artwork issue arose. I'm just focusing on one album now -- went in and deleted the artwork in iTunes, added new artwork, resynced -- and artwork is still wrong on the phone, and doesn't match what is in the computer. Again, I have an enormous library, and no time to f--- around with this. The handwriting is on the wall -- I need to get out of the Apple universe.

The problem seems random. I tried several of the "fixes" listed on this and other threads but the problems with album cover mismatching continued. Deleting the downloads on the phone and re-syncing works in some cases, not in others. It does seem however, that the problem tends to fix by itself with time (after several re-syncs and over a period of time). For some reason, it's the latest song adds that seem to cause the problem and usually if you are replacing songs or pasting artwork to album songs that didn't have any to begin with

Same problem except I am also missing a lot of music eg all music by artists starting with W.

Several attempts to follow steps above but I cannot find Settings > iPhone Storage

iPhone 12 mini iOS 14.7.1

I had this problem with downloaded music only (I'm not an Apple Music subscriber). All songs were duplicated and the artwork on all duplicates was mixed up.

I connected to the iTunes library on my Mac and deselected 'entire music library'. I then made sure NO songs were ticked under 'selected artists, albums, genres and playlists' and clicked 'Apply'

I then clicked 'Sync'

Itunes library on my iPhone 12 went to half the size and all the artwork appears OK.

So appears to be a sync issue. What happens next time i sync with my Mac? Presumably all the duplicates appear again? Pretty poor from Apple....

I deleted all the songs on my iPhone, and then did a complete sync of all the songs on my iTunes library on my MacBook Pro.

After that I checked only the playlists I wanted to sync, and synced again.

That seemed to fix it (although this probably won't work if you have more songs that can fit on your iPhone - although it might be possible to tweak what I did perhaps by selection more albums than what you want to sync?)

Thanks for this post and many of the answers.

This happened to my 12 Pro Max, most of the songs had wrong album covers. After reading many comments here, this is what I did and I got back all my songs with correct album covers.

1- Connect my phone to iTunes on my laptop. Unchecked the “Sync Music” box then confirm to “Remove” all playlists on my phone. Then hit “Sync”. So at this point all of the playlists and songs were gone, my phone had 0 songs.

2- Checked the “Sync Music” box then hit “Sync” again. All of my songs/playlists are transferred to my phone with the exact settings I have on iTunes and with the correct album covers.

Hope this helps someone!

I have this problem on iOS 15.0.2.

Have tried the fixes described on here, deleting everything, syncing, then re-adding and re-syncing, but most albums and playlists still have the wrong cover (but different wrong covers than before). It seems quite random.

This is on an iPhone 13 Pro, very frustrated that such an expensive phone has such a buggy music app.

My girlfriend and I just received the IOS 13p. Problem with syncing. Some artwork is mismatched with some songs. The computer shows the phones syncing, is not working correctly. Have tried different things on this apple blog, does not work.

This actually worked for me....for the most part. I think there are still a few mismatches but most look good. I imagine if I do it again they may all match up.

Ridiculous though that Apple never figured this out and sent out a fix for people..... (this is why I gave up my Mac computer years ago....).

Thank you!