I lost most of album artwork on iPhone's Music app, but artwork is intact on Mac's Music app. I've tried syncing/unsyncing music on Mac's Music app, and tried restarting both iPhone and Mac.
Help! (please and thx)
So like others, I had the issue that since the 26.4 update, random albums were not displaying their art. I tried various suggestions listed on here, restarting just the Music app on my phone, force restart the whole phone, resynching via iTunes and none worked. I have over 12,000 songs on my iPhone, some downloaded directly from Apple, some from other places, some ripped from CDs, and from various other places, and the missing artwork seemed randomly among all of them. I manually manage my iTunes and what goes on my phone, it's not simply the entire collection, so with the phone plugged in, I click on the device button, then music, and almost always add/remove using the albums option, something I've done going back to the early iPhones which had much more limited memory so I had to do this regularly back in the day.
Anyway, I tried a variation of what IEFNH8Zombies suggested, and eventually, after 3 hours of working around and trial and error, I finally fixed it. I had to do things a bit differently, so in case this may help others, here's what I did to the best of my recollection:
For these remaining 18 albums that were still not displaying their art on my phone, after trial and error, here's what I had to do:
I tried the previously suggested option of pasting the art on the desktop, but as I was essentially syncing after every album, it felt easier to just do this.
As mentioned, simply removing the albums, syncing, then adding them back and a second sync did restore more than half. If you still have albums that this doesn't fix, try the remove art/sync sequence described above before adding them back to your phone. For those 18 albums, it took me about 30~ minutes to complete that process.
Hope this helps. It's insane that this update can somehow break album art out of nowhere...
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. :(
iTunes on my iPhone iOS 26.3 was running fine. Did a sync with my iMac 2 days ago. All fine. Just updated to iOS 26.4 on my iPhone 15 pro max. Suddenly random albums in my iTunes library on my iPhone are showing blank album artwork.
If I open the album and play a track the art work is associated with the track and shows up. However if I’m just listing my albums in my library several are missing their cover artwork. This is extremely annoying and frustrating from a “recommended” iOS update.
i hope Apple fixes this in an update. I don’t want to have to re-sync my whole library which is huge.
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.
Update 17 March 2026
iOS & OS both 26.3.1
Still having this missing artwork issues, despite all suggested recommendations fixes, updates, reboots, removals, sign out / in etc etc etc, NOTHING WORKS.
Most annoyingly, all album artwork shows perfectly fine in OS Apple Music as well as on several third-party iOS music apps, so it's clearly not a metadata or file-related issue but a pure Apple iOS / OS sync issue.......what a total waste of time........
web_ed wrote:
....and this is how Apple Music starts up and then just hangs, until I choose an option in the sidebar.........every time.......
https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/aaf61111-4887-41d1-b1fd-a95bbea8af2f
That's been a bug for years. I used to report it to Apple at every OS roll, but gave up long ago.
thanks for reaching out
thanks and sorry to hear. I'm still looking for solutions
New method to try below :)
Yeah, you think they would have put out a bug fix for this by now. I still do the dragging trick on my Mac to make sure the cover art fills, but I think it might have fixed itself now hopefully
....and this is how Apple Music starts up and then just hangs, until I choose an option in the sidebar.........every time.......
Where? Which one? I don’t see anything newer than the ones older than this comment of yours. Can you reply with the new fix?
iPhone Music app missing album artwork
