iTunes Match not showing all artwork on iPhone

For me, the album artwork missing from my iPhone is from songs and albums that I purchased from the iTunes Store. Which is ironic. You'd think that in the "Apple ecosystem," it would be the opposite—that there would be a glitch with album artwork dragged onto someone's desktop from, say, Amazon or Wikipedia. No. It's the friggin' content I purchased from Apple (using the most up-to-date version of iTunes) that is stored on a year-old MacBook Pro (running the latest version of Mountain Lion) and that, in turn, is being synced to a two-month-old iPhone 5 (running the most up-to-date version of iOS).

As is the case for many people, my iTunes Library contains music both from CDs and from the iTunes Store. The library serves as a central repository for all of my music, and I manually manage what gets synced to my iPhone from there. Simple. Or at least it was until iOS 6.

All that Apple is teaching me here is that I'd be better off not purchasing any more content through the iTunes Store and, instead, return to purchasing CDs from Amazon—which, let's face it, are a bargain these days. Those albums, with their dragged-to-the-desktop artwork, are showing up perfectly on my iPhone. “Apple ecosystem,” meanwhile, seems to be less synonymous with “It just works” and “seamless”—the concepts that made so many of us customers for so many years.

Same here - "album" artwork is missing from my ipad, iTouch and iPhone but yet it shows in my iTunes on the Mac desk top. I was manually cutting and pasting the artwork - but I soon found a better way to correct. It seems to ONLY be music purchased from iTunes. Fortunately in my case, it was only 5 songs - but I deleted each song from all 3 devices...then synced each device back to my desktop (or iCloud) either wirelessly or with the cord - and the artwork was back.

Very stange Itune on my Macbook has most missing yet if i copy to My androide phone (samsung) or PC all there you would think apple could get it to work on it's own software i would have not been surprised if not on The PC or phone.

Ensuring some of the info in the "get info" section matches up correctly will fix some album artwork for me but not others. Who knows at this point, ha.

The odd thing to me is that I have very few albums missing artwork on my MBPro or iPhone. But significantly more missing album artwork on my ipad.

I think the missing artwork on iOS devices may be partly due to the quality of the WiFi connection used to download the Match artwork - basically, the iPhone is assuming a perfect connection, and is not behaving sensibly if some of its downloads from the cloud fail.

I think it tries to get the artwork a few times (or just once?!) and once it cannot, it permanently marks the album as not having any artwork.

I found that if I switch off Match then switch it on again on my iPhone then I get different missing artwork. (Actually - this bit doesn't fit my theory so well - some of the albums missing artwork seem to always stay the same, but at least some of them change each time, so it could be two different things going on, one of which is what I'm saying.)

But this is the key thing: the percentage of albums missing artwork seems to depend on the quality of the WiFi connection I am connected to! Lots more missing on a poor connection.

True, on different artwork missing when I switch Match off-then-on on my iphone. So silly. It seems on the surface that this should be an easy fix...I mean, I don't generally have missing artwork when Match is turned off on my laptop or iphone or ipad. But turn Match on, and voila! -- missing artwork!

I've gone thru my library, as some have suggested, to make sure the album info matched-up like it is supposed to. This fixed a couple of albums, but not the majority of them (I appreciate the suggested fix, though).

I'm glad what I worked out seems to be true for someone else.

I've now managed to get artwork for every single album onto my iPhone (140 albums, 1,800 songs, so it's not a massive collection).

I think the problem with non-perfect wireless connections can actually strike at either end, i.e. when your iOS device pulls the content from the Cloud, or when your Mac or PC first pushes the content into the Cloud.

Either one can can result in a missing album cover. (Which may be part of why it is so confusing.)

Once you've switched iTunes Match off and on a few times on your iOS device (and you have to wait at least 10 mins or so after switching back on, to see which album covers really come through), then you start to get an idea of which album covers are never going to come through, however many times you try.

For those permanently missing covers, you have to drag the album art out of one of the tracks, then re-apply it to the whole album, in iTunes on the source computer (as per lots of other posts about this issue). However, as far as I can see, you *don't* need to select "Update iTunes Match" after doing this, and it doesn't really help to do so. iTunes uploads the changes anyway, in its own good time, and for me selecting Update Match whilst this is happening causes the Update Match to fail anyway. You can tell that iTunes has finished uploading the changes automatically, once the little stripey cloud icon has changed back to a plain cloud, and once iTunes stops warning you that your data isn't in the cloud yet, if you click CTRL+I again to edit info on one of the changed tracks.

Finally, you can now switch Match off and on (again!) on the iOS device, praying and hoping that you have a *very* good internet connection.

Hopefully, if you do, it will get across all the albums, with all the artwork. (That said, I still have a few albums showing old artwork for the small image, even though they have the latest artwork which I uploaded, in cover flow for instance!! But it's much closer to correct.)

Based on what's happened for me, here, this is obviously pretty sucky, and also anyone with a really large music collection is going to struggle to ever get all their album artwork to appear on their iPhone or iPad.

(I have iTunes 11.0.2.26 on a PC, also syncing to another computer (a Mac) and to an iPhone 4, iOS 5.1.1.)

Open iTunes - Go to "Albums" (you should have your albums in the grid view)

1) Click "Edit" at top

2) Click "Select All"

This should select all of the albums.

3) Then right click (control click) on any album

You should have a window pop up

4) Click "Get Artwork"

This will grab all artwork for every album (if available)

I have never used match but have been having the same problem of missing/wrong artwork for ages. Just waiting waiting waiting for a fix.

I have a lot of live music from a local band that was recorded at local clubs. I have successfully imported the music to iTunes.

When I try to add album artwork using GET INFO, sometimes the selected artwork appears, sometimes it doesn't.

I am using the same custom artwork file for all of these albums.

Why does my custom album art appear for some albums but not others? It's the same JPEG for all of the albums.

I have tried adding artwork from the ALBUMS view, and I have also tried adding the artwork from the SONGS view (by selecting all of the songs on the album and hitting GET INFO). Nothing works.

Okay, I had the same issue with album artwork either not showing up at all or wrong on my iPad2, yet all the album artwork is correct on iTunes on my laptop running Windows 7. I needed an automated solution as I have a lot of songs and something manual was going to take forever. I did not "discover" this but it worked for me. In iTunes, with the iPad2 connected, under my iPad, under music I deselected "sync music" and applied. This effectively erased all music on my IPad2. Then I reselected 'sync music' but with no other options selected (i.e. no videos, memos...), and applied this change. This replaced all the music on my iPad 2 (which took a while) but it worked. Finally, I included music videos and applied this. This process took a some time but it did work. I have had to do this infrequently to as over time the album artworks seems to get messed up. Obviously not a perfect solution but one that works for me.

Ok: so I had a problem with album artwork initially on my main computer (where I have an external hard drive and have loaded 1500 CD's) - I was finding that I couldn't update artwork that would stick because of the iTunes match interference. So I turned off iTunes match on the computer where the main music library is, updated the artwork that required it, turned on iTunes match back on .... et voila!! So then I found that artwork was either old or missing on apple tv, iPad, iPhone, iPad and MacBook pro. In the case of the iPod (it's classic), I restored factory settings and then started the sync from scratch - with items that you sync they don't re-look at something that is already there so if you change the artwork, it won't be noticed. So this would seem the way to go with anything you plug in to your main library to sync. As far as match goes for the other items, I merely signed out of iTunes match (and in the case of Apple TV - even the user), made sure it was no longer registering and then signed back in. And again - it took the latest version of the artwork that I was using. In all cases - there is quite a bit of waiting time - but it does work if you are patient. Again - it isn't a perfect solution because if at any time I wan't to change the artwork associated I will have to run this process over again. However, to try and limit this I have turned off the option to automatically download artwork on the main source and if I upload a CD I choose the artwork I want associated with it (before uploading it).

Not sure if this solution is valid across the board; but has worked for me.

1. Uncheck Sync Music to erase the music library from the iPhone.

2. Sync the iPhone and confirm there is no music on the phone's library.

3. In iTunes, under the "Store" menu option, select Update Genius.

4. Then under the "Store" menu option, select update iTunes Match

5. Re-check the Sync Music function on your device "Music" tab, and re-sync your library back to the iPhone.

I've had this artwork issue on every iPhone I've owned since the introduction of the "Genius" function. In previous iTunes versions -- you could simply turn off Genius which seemed to magically solve the problem. Now with the latest iTunes versions, Genius is ever present -- and seems that it's "cross-referencing" properties has a partly incorrect coding deep within the iTunes software.

I'm not sure if your OP was updated and you fixed the problem or not, but I had the same problem and your post gave me insight into what was happening. This seems to have been my problem too. I restored from the cloud after a factory reset and OS update where Match wasn't turned on. The restore had my music app reporting X songs on the device taking up Y GB, when in reality the music wasn't there since I restored from the cloud, not a PC, and hadn't synced with iTunes on my PC to have the songs copied back to the device. I turned on Match, and the cover art for those songs didn't import. Thanks for your post, as I was able to figure out that the music without cover art was this music that was lost in translation, that I had had on my device prior to the factory reset and OS update and from there figure out I just needed to delete the data from the music app under General > Usage after turning Match off. I've done that and now have turned Match back on and am waiting for it to finish retrieving all of the library, but I believe the problem should be solved. You saved me a factory reset and set up as a new iPhone, which is what I had to do the last time I had this problem (also likely caused from a reset and iCloud restore).

Craig Vinson wrote:

I'm another person having nothing but problems when it comes to artwork with iTunes match.

EVERY song in my library has artwork attached to it. I see it in my library on each individual song. After Match completed I turned it on my iPhone and most of my artwork stopped showing up on my phone. It still shows in my library.

Now when I turned Match on my iPad (which had NO music on it pre-Match) it seems all the artwork is showing up fine so far.

So it seems like the issue is occuring on my iPhone (and my wife's) which had music on it BEFORE I turned on Match. I assumed when I clicked enable it would delete alll the music on my phone and then re-download it from the cloud but that didn't seem to happen.

Any ideas?

i thought i had this issue pretty much under control, but now with ios7, it's back worse than ever. loads of artwork missing from itunes on my iphone and ipad.

i have double cds showing artwork on one disc, but not the other. it's the same jpeg in both.