Apple Music no longer shows album artwork on playlists

Apple you must at least give us the option to build our playlist which include the album artwork. It’s most appealing and satisfying to be able to look at each unique playlist covers when choosing which ones we want to listen to. Keep growing and doing new things but give us an option to chose artwork for our playlist.

It's hopeless. I am held hostage by the cheeeezy artwork that Apple has embedded into my musicAlbums.

I might 1)go to the older computer iTUNEs and drag a play list track by track to a flash drive.

2) go to newer computer with new but not improved red music ICON open up Play list library. 3) create a new play list and drag the mp3 files to the Play list 4) see if that works 5)plug in the flash drive and drag the mp3 files to the desk top no dragging and dropping files anymore directly to the play list . U have to click on the file , as it plays in iTunes click for a drop window then EDIT TO PLAY LIST. Apple makes changes that are not improvements. The cheezy artwork is all geared to a visual that may elicit a purchase. Boy Apple is either run by an A.I. or ADHD children who can't organiZe a sock drawer. It is so sad. ADHD children can be helped. APPLE can't. The tech team is thin skinned and arrogant.

A bit of a different question, does anyone have a very large music library on an external hard drive? I do and in recent years have been having chronic problems with the library being read etc. anyone else having this issue?

I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong and why my album covers were not showing up when I created a new playlist. The “color” design is boring and actually quite ugly but most importantly makes it very difficult to differentiate my playlists!

CHANGE IT BACK TO HOW IT WAS!!

Or at the very least let the USER decide if they want a “color” album or the actual artist’s album cover!! Which by the way the artist puts a lot of time, effort and money into!

Really hope Apple listens to its paying customers and makes the change back to how it was!!!

Thanks for this. It works on Mac, as you outline, but not on iPhone. However, adding a new track to a playlist created on Mac with the procedure outlined and then moving the song to be one of the first four tracks does trigger an update to the playlist artwork grid on iPhone. So, I'll be creating playlists on my Mac using this workflow in the future.

The cynic in me thinks that Apple has overlooked this workflow to create playlists and that a future update will take this Mac "fix" away.

Hey guys -- so, I duplicated old playlists (that did have the 4 album artwork option) and when I deleted the songs and pasted in the new playlist (from the one withOUT artwork) it worked! An annoying work around, but for now, it seems to provide the option I want. Until Apple decides to take that away too for whatever reason. The four albums are VERY useful - not just for the visual appeal. But what Apple doesn't seem to understand (or perhaps care about) is that it is a quick shorthand for mixes. I have 100s of hours of mixes -- for various moods, settings and events. Glancing at the four albums immediately lets me know if this is a good mix for the occasion (ie., I'm not putting on my trippy/spacey/70s jazz mix with my mom). There's no legitimate reason to get rid of this feature. But at least this work around lets us restore it. An absolute unforced error on Apple's end. But so it goes...

On the iPhone, this seems to behave differently if you create a new playlist from "playlists" in the main apple music section versus if you go to "downloads" and select a song and add to a playlist with the "create a new playlist" option. The former will let you add songs and will use the standard 4-album artwork cover correctly (as of Feb 16th). If you do it from your songs in "downloads" it adds the boring new pinkish covers. However, I've also found that if you select an existing playlist which has the 4-album artwork cover from within "downloads" list of playlists and click the 3 dots at the top and select "add to playlist", click "new playlist", swipe the covers to the left to the camera icon (do not click on the camera icon to select a photo, just swipe to it), and then enter the new name, you will effectively duplicate the playlist and get the 4-album artwork cover. You can then add new songs to this one and delete the existing songs that you don't want. Covers will update as needed. Both of these options have worked for me to get albums with the 4-cover artwork.

I'm glad I came across this thread, because I initally thought there was something wrong with just my apple music app.

It seems that Apple have decided to not support the automatic playlist cover creation. Instead now, for my meditation playlist, I have an awful brown playlist picture, instead of the usual album covers. My older playlists still have their original album covers. This new colour thing only applies to new playlists, and I dont like it! It's all either marbly brown, or brown smoke style or black with brown dots. It's ugly! Yuck! Or, I can upload my own chosen photo, but I don't have pictures saved of all the albums that I have stored on my apple music app.

Please apple, bring back the previous auto cover genrator. Why should there only be a marbly, smokey brown 💩 pic for the playlist!? Ugly!

Old iTunes permitted my choice for play list artwork. Now, Apple assigns some cheezy artwork and I have to create an alternative. I cannot opt out of any artwork. Guess I'll have to create a blank tile.? Would be polite and adult of Apple to fix what is broken and stay out of the art business since they have their hands full with tech support. The entire micromanagement is intrusive.

In response to afgkelley and otherness2018: see my post of Feb 8th. If you have an existing playlist, in Music on Mac hit CMD-A to select all songs > Add to new Playlist and select the most left “empty” artwork tile with the red + in it. Should work.

Kirk to Apple. No change. We were obviously not complaining enough or have enough complaints to get a response. I did the feedback thing and still nothing. Only work around I have to take a screenshot of the album artwork and use that instead. Ridiculous. One to beam up..

I tried this before commenting but unfortunately all I got was a plain graphic and not the album art.

I do not subscribe to Apple Music streaming. I am making playlists from tracks I’ve imported from CDs and/or downloaded from the iTunes Store. Not sure if this makes a difference.

Of course we would, it's Apple they think they know best. Don't get me wrong, all the OSs have issues. I make it myself now!

on Mac, screen shot in album view of your playlist. Double click to open in preview, file, export as jpeg. (Another issue where "Apple knows best" as music app edit wont accept the png file) Then in music edit your playlist and click on the bland new playlist picture and go all the way to the left you can chose that jpeg you just made. See one here. https://app.box.com/s/v1s4cgcls6s3cjdwv4a4b6o1bk9mdy68

I really think that they should add this back. The new covers are just bland. Also this way it is way easier to identify what albums have what music in it. I did figure out a way that you could sort of fix it but it is nothing official. Basically it has to do with screen shots and photo editing. But this is a very long process and takes nearly 15 minutes for just one playlist and is not worth. If they don't make it the primary function they should at least have it as an option.

Further evidence of Apple embracing the false assumption that they know what we want better than we do ourselves. I mean, why not? It works for Microsoft.

We don't want this horrifically mundane cover art generated by some artificial stupidity agent, and we definitely don't need Jack Donaghy to take something that's already working and fix it.