iTunes Match Lost Cover Art

In my case, I don't think size is an issue. A couple of the covers not showing are 200x200. Plus, iTunes uses 600x600, and I have a few 1024x1024 covers that show up just fine.

By file size I meant the actual size of the file, not dpi. I've seen 300 x 300 over a megabyte and 600x 600 under 40k. You might want to check via the finder or do a get info. If it's over 40k, I'd run it through anything that will let you save a jpg with higher compression. I just use preview.

JiminMissouri, I will check some file sizes when I get home, but I'm pretty sure several of the offending covers are quite small, and many of the ones that work are larger than 40k. I'm also curious how large the typical iTunes covers are.

i've tried all of the various suggestions and combinations of them. the ONLY thing that works for me is to delete the offending album from itunes, icloud, then re-add it into itunes and add the album art. i've got about 2000 albums loaded. at least 300 are missing album art in the cloud...probably more. this is going to be tedious.

Michael, deleting from iCloud is the only thing that has worked for me as well. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have worked for every album.

i think it may be even worse. i may need to delete the album from the mac entirely. experiments. continue.

never mind. i'm really giving up now. i believe album art is just broke in match. i see art appear and disappear and re-appear, but ultimately it seems to finally disappear (from my iphone & ipad) no matter what i do. i'm certainly not going to invest hours and hours resetting the art (which looks fine on my mac and transferred fine the old fashioned way to my idevices) if the art ends up gone anyway.

all that remains now is to decide whether i want to continue to bother with match at all. i'm leaning towards turning it off on my iphone4 and ipad1, but leaving the basic facility in place in hopes that apple gets it working some day.

I agree with Michael; I continue to be dismayed that Apple has put forth such a medicore effort with iTunes Match.

While I'm finding that iTunes Match works most of the time, I still encounter album artwork that won't display at all, album art that won't change when playing music in shuffle mode, songs that stutter when playing and complete irritation that no one at Apple ever thought to program the capability to allow for both Cloud music access in conjunction with directly managed music on my iPhone 4.

Steve's micromanaging and perfectionism had one great benefit; it assured his customers that these types of issues and aggravations had already been addressed and would never bother them.

Tim has a long way to go and should make a visible effort to step up to the plate, own these iTunes Match mistakes and correct them yesterday.

-joedy

ive been having the same problem, when your music goes through itunes match alot of my tracks then loose the artwork and have to then manually paste again in info. was a pain staking process to say the least... i'ts also not appearing on my iphone but what i have noticed ( and im not sure if this is directly linked to the issue) when you go to albums on your iphone and view the albums and artwork pics im getting the circle that you get when using the internet when my wifi is on and slowly but surely artwork starts to appear so i think what it needs to do is connect to your icloud library in order to push the artwork through to your device. im not too sure if you have to keep the screen on the album section but i did as the loading icon stopped appearing when i go back to home page.... all the artwork appeared within 10 mins. give this a try and let me know if its worked for you. also i think it will only work if your connected to a wifi network (the same with only being able to download from icloud by wifi)

I have artworks of any size and any weight in bytes, not an issue. The only issue (for me at least, it seems) is the artwork showing correctly in Finder. Once I get this done correctly everything show up elsewhere.

gobigdave,

I think I read somewhere that you were saying it was still not working for some cases. The painful but working solution is to remove the artwork from the files in iTunes, and to remove the songs entries from iTunes (with iCloud box checked) but of course keep the files. Add the files back to iTunes, re-put the artwork in all files. For sure it's crazy painfully stupid but it works.

For my case I know how to make this work so I actually now spend some time to clean my library and later will update everything in one shot.

Also something I've just realized is that there are 2 previews available in Finder, depending of your style of showing the files. You NEED to get the 2 previews working, else the artwork is not gonna work on your devices. It's linked to a known bugs from iTunes/Finder that has been around for a couple of years but that appear erracicaly on some people's machines. Check it out for your missing artwork, there's no way it's not gonna work!

In the latest screenshot, if you have the generic icon instead of the artwork it's not gonna show up on your devices.

For sure iTunes Match is updated in the devices only on WIFI. Don't except to see changes if you're in 3G. You can download the files of course but the propagation of the album artwork is not gonna happen.

I with you godbout. The only thing that seems to work when cover art starts acting funny is to drop the files from iCloud and your library, wait for the removal to propogate to all your devices, close iTunes on all your devices, then add the files back to the master iTunes. Of course, the artwork must be fully embedded into all your files to have a prayer of it really working. Last night, I think I finally got all my gremlins out as I have the correct artwork displaying on all devices.

To summarize, there are two issue at play here.

1. Wrong or no cover art on devices. If your art is not embedded and exactly the same on all album tracks, Match can get in a funny state for synchronization. It is a royal pain to correct this.

2. Artwork not displaying on the iPhone at playback. For some reason (space maybe?), Match looks to be stripping the artwork when downloading a track. When you first play the track, it goes back to iCloud to find the artwork, and then it is probably stored on an album basis. If that doesn't come down fast enough, it doesn't display. That may be why switching to cover flow and back fixes it.

Finally, I don't think the size of the cover art file has anything to do with it. The cover art that I had both problems with ranged from 15k to 180k in size. The same can be said for all the art that worked.

I'm currently at the point that I have correct artwork in iTunes and both on my iPad and iPhone. My artwork differs in size and file size, but it is embedded in every file and as a folder.jpg file in every album folder on my hdd. After iMatch, i had almost none artwork in iTunes, but openening the file info for a track of an album fixed that issue for the whole album.

What still bothers me: the artwork on my iphone/pad shows up for the first track of an album only. So everything is fine when I use album view / cover flow. But as soon as start playback, I will see the cover art as long as the first track is playing and then none. As far as I can tell thats true for every album out of 1000 that I've tried. I started matching about three weeks ago, so it can't be a download issue. Funny enough, that is even true for albums that have been on my iphone before I started matching, stayed there during the process and havent been downloaded afterwards.

Like many it seems I've been having problems since upgrading to iOS5 and iTunes Match on my iPhone 4 and Windows 7 PC.

I've re added missing album artwork using a combination auto download and manually adding (now selecting all tracks) to each album iTunes/gracenote can't find.

This however did not resolve the issue of missing art work on my iPhone, which is particularly frustrating as this acts as a visual link to the album and artist (my instant recognition of tracks from the intro is not good) which is especially useful when listing on all songs shuffle when I'm driving (I have a Parrot car kit which shows the artwork on it's colour screen) so I can quickly skip forward a track.

What I've found is that the first track on any albumn seems to always have the artwork (as described by others) but all others don't, unless I I either switch the phone to landscape and back again or flick back to the albumn details and back again, but this doesn't always work. When viewing my library in iTunes, every track has artwork, so it didn't seem to make sense that artwork was missing on my iPhone.

On reading some of the replies here, I have taken to simply playing each albumn in turn (whilst at home with fast broadband) skipping through each track. You'll notice the wifi wheel kick in when you play an album/song for the first time.

Once I've skipped through each track, I check the album again and all tracks now have the artwork associated and when you play the album later the phone doesn't show any wifi activity. If activity is shown you'll probably come across a track still missing it's artwork!

Whilst time consuming if I was to do my entire library, it seem to provide a solution to the missing artwork on an iOS device.

To me, it seems that the association between artwork and all tracks in the same album hasn't been fully made until you play them on an iOS device (running iOS5).

When adding any new music I will take that extra minute to manually edit the entire album (selecting multiple tracks) an re-associate the artwork as suggested by many others in the hope that this will prevent this occuring, but I'm not entirly convinced.