iTunes 11 - Album Art Not Showing, But It Exists

If I 'Get Info' on any of my music running on my NAS home server, the Artwork tab is grey (gray), yet this audio all has artwork included: no amount of clicking 'OK' will fix it! These are my files, not Apples, so kindly reinstate the options to view MY artwork on MY audio files. The only artwork that I have visible is for tracks that are on iCloud / iTunes Match that I purchased from the iTunes Music Store, and the rest of iCloud / iTunes Match has vanished from the Music Library! Please reinstate the 10,468 missing songs.

Maybe you should have tried out this software before releasing it.

I am having the same problem!

Between this, and having to rebuild my iTunes library (it corrupted mine after update) this new version of iTunes is a major headache.

If you right-click on an album and choose "get album artwork" then the artwork appears. To save time you can select more than one album at a time. I just did it for 12 albums and it works for 75% of them.

"Get album artwork' isn't the solution, all my music has artwork already embedded in the files, much of it is not albums (privately recorded music, etc.) and therefore doesn't have available artwork on the internet. It is MY artwork that I want to be able to see. On the other hand, after two days the rest of my iClound / iTunes Match material has turned up and this mostly has artwork visible. So, just my iTunes Server has no art available.... and much of this has a greyed out artwork tab in Get Info......

Having the exact same problem with a library that is about 1500 albums. I tried deleting the cache and it doesn't help. The Get Info trick you describe works for me too, but I'm not doing that for hundreds and hundreds of albums.

Maybe this is a problem with Firefly on a Netgear NAS, an iTunes Streaming Server program: wouldn't it make sense to have tested these server programs before release?

Poor show Apple, you undermine yourself by neglecting this.

I found that selecting albums with missing artwork in Albums view, then using the applescript "Re-Embed Artwork" (http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=reembedartwork) worked for me. Much quicker than re-adding them one by one.

Aha, running a local library with the server mounted and available, no pictures; if I restart iTunes and change the Library to the server library, then iTunes spends ten minutes 'Updating iTunes Library".... and then the artwork reappears within the Music folder, but not when viewed from the server folder. First question then, why doesn't the server library get updated when accessed via iTunes 11, and secondly why doesn't the server have any artwork... Bonkers

Thanks for the tip 🙂. I'm currently working my way through my library while Apple works on a fix.

I have the same issue. After importing my music collection on a new mac with iTunes 11, all the embedded album art was present and displayed correctly. However, a few days later I noticed that over half of the album art was not being displayed. There's no real pattern to which albums are not displaying art.

NB) The other thing I've noticed is that you can no longer import .png album art only jpg. Bit odd given the album art is still exported from iTunes in png format.

The fundamental thing to have artwork always showing is to embed the artwork to the music file so that the artwork can be transferred along with the music files.Tenorshare Music Cleanup comes in for help. This program automatically finds artwork for all the songs in your music collection and then you can embed the artwork in just a click.

The problem occurs because iTunes stores its album art in a separate folder within its heirarchy and not within the files themselves. Therefore the art appears in iTunes but not the Finder. You can embed the art by going to one of the files in the album and copying the art with Apple-C, then go back to the main listing and selecting all songs in that album and select Apple-I and then paste the art into the empty box and click okay. It takes a few seconds. The quickest way to do this is to use an Apple script from Doug's Applescripts for iTunes such as http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=reembedartwork.

The crucial area where people are running into problems and which I found out by chance is that sometimes the automatically downloaded cover art from iTunes can be a PNG file, and the re-embed function or even the copy-paste method mentioned above works with JPEGs. If you run into this problem you can export your PNG file out of your music file by dragging it to the desktop, then using Preview you can make a quick JPEG art file and use that instead.

I have found that even if you follow this advice sometimes even the JPEGs won't embed no matter what you do. The only way I managed to get past this was either to restart the computer and reload iTunes, or the brutal method, delete the iTunes Album Artwork folder. This second option shouldn't be taken lightly - you will basically lose all your artwork if you are reliant on Apple iTunes store's artwork. Don't even think about it unless you know what you are doing. If you want to somehow retain the folder you could always copy it off to an external drive then unplug the drive and delete the folder and reinstate it later, but I haven't tried this and it might break all the links to the music.

The only way that worked every time is to restart the computer if the art won't embed and the finder thumbnails won't update. Therefore stick with that before anything else. iTunes seems to have some serious issues within its software when it comes to embedding art properly.

BEFORE YOU DELETE ANYTHING TRY THIS

After at least 20 hours LOST as a result of this happening, I am closer to resolution.

0. Close the Music app on your device and ANYTHING ELSE that uses your library.

1. Make sure all the artwork is in your iTunes (yes its a pain, but bite the bullet - cop an external drive, backup, and reload your media). You dont have to start from ground zero like this, like i said, nearly 20 hours, but it eliminates the idea that your artwork is all over the place and can't be synced as a result.

2. Go to the songs listed on your iPhone in iTunes (sorry to do this but...I'm using an iPhone 6 Plus wi...just kidding - basically, I'm doing this on an iPhone), highlight them all, then right click uncheck selection. May take a while but in under 1.5 minutes it'll do that.

At this point iTunes started doing its typical autonomous decision making and kept quiet.

3. Unhighlight it all then highlight it all again, right click, then choose check selection.

It'll do it's thing, clever device that it is.

It seems nothing has happened, but I think it effectively forces a Man In The Mirror moment (pardon me, I'm happy it worked), it wants to make that change.

4. Hit Sync, what should happen is that it'll do the nightmare thing where it prepares to update for ages - I think if ur reading this, you know what that implies, but let it go ahead. It's going to remove all the artwork from the phone but not the file don't worry. This is good.

5. Vent a little bit (about apple, Donald Trump, the economy), just not about me, Kanye West or President Obama - they're both good people up against an established system, and I'm HELPING ur @$$...I digress. Breathe.

6. Get back to this system, it should've synced by now and your music should still play just with no artwork - don't sob.

7. Unplug it, plug it back in, you don't have to but it won't hurt.

8. Sync again, this time it'll sync and do the preparing to update thing again except this time its a good one. It should eventually finish preparing and bloody well get to it - I have about 10,100 songs so I expected it to take ages but wasn't that long, it did it 4402 songs the first time (7-10 mins). I opened iTunes on my phone and sadly no artwork - I was very angry - keep the faith tho.

9. Sync again, yes it'll prepare to update AGAIN, then, it did another batch of 4402 or there about of syncing.

10. Open iTunes on your phone and TA-DA!

11. You may have to sync again but fortunately for me it only took two rounds and i didn't delete anything.

Hope it works!

One more thing - all lives matter, so stand up, speak up - we're all human nobody needs to be oppressed and keeping people out or ensuring they stay in boxes is only going to rot whats within. Reason and help. Like I just did. 🙂