iPhone Music app missing album artwork

Fix: I did a iPhone Reset All then synced my music again with the MacBook. At first look the album covers were still missing so I deleted and reinstalled the music app without restarting the phone and peaked again and all album art returned.😊

Finally fixed this issue. In the music app on my MacBook, I went to each song in an album that had missing artwork. Usually, the first listed song shows a visible album cover when played, but the rest of the songs don't show art in the "now playing " section. When I click the involved songs with the shift key and then get info, it shows artwork. I then go to edit and delete the album cover using the cut command. Then click ok, go to the library, get album artwork, and then retest. Usually it is fixed. Occasionally, Apple AI picks a random album cover that is obviously wrong or different from the first song on the album, which was correct. So then I had to click the group of songs, edit and cut the wrong art, go to the proper artwork, copy, and then paste it into the group. This was time-consuming: going through the entire song Library, checking Now Playing for missing artwork. I had about a third of my songs missing artwork. I can say it is fixed, and my BP is lower now!

If you use the manually manage your music option on Mac (I assume we're talking about managing Local Files, right?), use CMD + A to select all albums in your library, then drag the selected albums onto your phone in the sidebar. I just had the issue where for some reason, autofilling was refusing to transfer the album artwork onto my phone. But, when I dragged my albums in (either one by one, or all of them selected at once like I mentioned earlier), it worked properly.

I was able to fix it without doing a complete wipe or reset. I turned off Sync Library under the Music preferences menu on my iMac. It took a few minutes for it to unsync and it deleted the Genius cache. Then I turned it back on and waited while Genius resynced. On my iPhone, I turned off Sync Library, closed the app, turned Sync back on. When I opened the Music app, all the album covers were back.

So I was having this issue too. The process I've found that works for me is as follows.

1 open the song info/album info and go to the album art tab at the top of that window for the song were adding art too or the art is not showing correctly.

2 drag your photo from this window to the desktop or download whatever photo you're trying to use to the desktop.

3 in the album art tab of the song info/album info screen delete every pictures that might be in this window now and hit ok.

4 iTunes will flash like you've made a change. Now open the song info/album info window for this song back up and go back to the album art tab. This tab should be empty if not delete the photo gain.

5 Now this has been the important part for mine to work. You drag and drop the picture from your desktop into the album art tab and drop it in there then hit ok again. Do not use the upload photo button that shows in the album art tab you must drag and drop the song photo into iTunes for this to work.

This works for me on every song I have weather I've DL from apple or rip a song off YouTube and put my own picture to the song it seems to work great for me. Art usually populates for me in a minute or two.

Great advice, i will try that next time! Yes i eventually fixed it by using the 1 month free Apple Music trial to sync everything that way and disable it afterwards, not the best solution but it worked nonetheless!

...and now, to add insult to injury, the artwork shows just fine when selecting "Get Info" on an album but the artwork does not show in the main Music app window.......

So then I clicked on the artwork in the "Get Info" tab and basically copied it onto itself (Ctlr C -> Ctrl V), press ok, and then the artwork showed up in the main window again.

Anybody @ Apple expecting me to do this for thousands of albums, one by one.......?

And who knows what'll happen once I start trying to sync to iOS again.

What an absolute total cr*p of software this Apple Music is.

Me too. Only songs that were purchased in iTunes have album art all others don't get transferred to my phone as of yesterday. While syncing the progress bar shows that album art work is syncing but it never shows up even after deleting music app on the phone and reinstalling and syncing. I think we have to wait for a fix.

The nuclear option is to roll the dice and after new backup to iCloud do a full erase all content and settings on the iPhone and hope the album covers sync again. I refuse to do this yet.

I have just had the same issue.

My iphone was wiped for a screen/battery replacement (was on beta software) and after reinstalling everything again I connected to my mac to transfer all my music (38gig) and all album art was missing.

A week later it was still like this so I deleted the music app on iOS, deleted all music on the phone, reinstalled the app and re-synced all music (with proper album art on the mac btw) but again nothing. Except for 3 songs I once gave a <3, and the iTunes purchased songs, I have no album art.

I downloaded another couple of music player apps ( Doppi was the best one ) and here I get a hand full of albums with artwork on some of the songs, mostly albums I have once uploaded the artwork myself I believe.

So weird...

iPhone 13 mini on iOS 26.2 (no longer bèta)

I know right… i did a complete reset of my phone and while that worked for me, after couple of weeks one day all my album art was gone again.

i just left it as that and boom, 2 weeks later all my album art was back . It has been great for a long time but yesterday it decided to go missing again …

“they’ll be back”

Update 28 March 2026

After updating OS and iOS to 26.4, here's a snapshot of how my Music App library looks like.......

iOS is very much the same, except there's some artwork showing that does not show on Mac, an vice versa.

Yes, done all the resets, account log-outs / login-ins, de- and re-authorizations, re-syncs, empty syncs, manually sync, delete artwork cache (by the way, a lot of artwork showed in the artwork cache folder that did not show in the Music app itself.......go figure!), network reset, reboots, consolidate library, keep media organized etc etc.

It just simply does not work.

No, I am not an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscriber.

"Get album artwork" command runs empty, also cannot "Turn on Genius" in Music.

I realize I will eventually have to go "nuclear" and create a new library, from scratch. At over 40K songs, well done & congratulations to Apple for making the joy of listening to Music so unnecessarily difficult.

Got the same problem since the 26.4 update. Half of my music library on the iPhone shows the artwork missing, seemingly at random, and only in the library itself - when I play the album, everything is fine. This is annoying as ****, and no restarting of the music app or the iPhone itself is helping. :(

Sorry to say, but my album covers did not reappear after all. I am back to square one and will have to wait for Apple to fix this. I am so mad. During this process, two custom playlists were removed, so I have to reassign ~200 songs back to them.