iPhone13 - wrong album covers after 1st time synching with iMac

I had the same problem and solved it simply as follows. This assumes you don't have any music only on your iPhone that you want to keep, i.e. you want to replace everything on your iPhone with what's on your Mac:

1. Uncheck "Sync music onto X's Phone", let it resync with the phone.

2. (Optional) If for whatever reason there's anything left in your Music app, delete it from your phone (Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage -> Music), then left swipe on All Music to show a Delete button.

2. Click Delete App to delete the actual Music app.

3. Reinstall the app from the App Store.

4. Check the "Sync music onto X's phone" again, and let it copy over all the music.

This should result in all your music back on the phone, with the correct album art.

Try checking song info for each track and look for fields with special characters (html, null or other). Make sure to check each track in the album and delete any special characters. Once done, sync again and check if the correct image is now showing on your phone.

I understand it would be too much of a pain to change all your albums. It might be useful to others to know if this issue applies to iTunes. Maybe just try it on one album and let us know if it changes anything? FYI I have an iPhone 13 mini and didn’t notice this issue on my old phone. I have a hard time believing it’s the phone and not an app upgrade that’s caused the issue but you never know. Regardless Apple should address this.

Hi,

I have this issue as well. It was chronic and became worse each time I tried to sync with my iMac, so I deleted all of my music on my iPhone 13 Mini and synched again. It reduced 98% of the errors.

I just can't live with the 2% error.

At the moment I am correcting the album covers on the iMac, then deleting all the music on my iPhone 13 mini. I then sync my music between the iMac and iPhone.

The enraging thing is that I can watch it all get out of sync over time and it gets progressively worse until I my patience cracks and I repeat the cycle.

My husband and I have the same problem. He deleted his whole library and re-synched. I don't want to do that as I also have a few that have been bought online that I don't want to lose.

It is not a problem that just you are having. Yes, I too am HATING seeing the wrong album cover come up when playing songs on my phone.

I believe I fixed the issue!!! I had to download all of the music in my library to my computer (instead of just having it there from the cloud). Once I downloaded all music to my computer itself and then synced with my phone (13 pro max) all the album art fixed itself!

I discovered something interesting. Changes made in phone correctly sync with music library on Mac (editing playlist, adding or deleting songs, etc.). But changes made on Mac (titles, covers etc.) dont sync with music app on iPhone.

I think I agree that tie iOS 15.4 upgrade may be part of the problem. My iPhone 13 was fine and all my album artwork was synced perfectly until I upgraded to 15.4. Since then some of the artwork is correct and some is incorrect and, like others on this thread, my music is stored on my mac mini and I have way too much to go song by song or artist by artist and I also have some older music I uploaded which can't be replaced easily. Apple needs to correct this issue.

Bless this thread! I thought I was going crazy. Upgraded to iOS 15.4.1 two days ago, plugged my iPhone 13 into my MacBook to update my music and it’s all out of wack. Happy to see we’re in this together. Hopefully Apple will have another software update soon that fixes this.