Artist Pictures On Music App - iOS 7 Update

Robert McQueen:

I was able to trick iOS 7 into showing album art instead of the artist photo. I noticed the wrong artist photo was pushed for the 60's band Cream. No idea who is in the photo they're using, but it was clearly not Cream. I found that by changing the artist name by adding a space immediately after the artist's name in the "Artist" field in iTunes it would show album art instead. When I made that change in iTunes on the computer the incorrect artist photo was replaced by album art.

I am using Match, so the change was pushed, but I imagine it will work the same if you add music manually or sync the music library with iTunes.

For those that want the artist profile photo, if they're not showing this ought to work:

If you don't have it set this way already, toggle "Group By Album Artist" in Settings->Music. For some reason that makes a difference for some artists in your library that appear when album artist is set to "Various Artists" or something other than the track's artist. Logout of your Apple ID. Log in with any other Apple ID. Open the Music app and watch all the artist images load in the Artisits tab. Once it is done, logout of the other Apple ID and login with your regular Apple ID. Finally, all the artist images will remain. Those artists that do not have a profile photo with iTunes will still show album art, which is by design. Hopefully Apple will keep updating that database.

Is anyone besides me trying to figure out how much space these new images are consuming on their devices? I have close to 1,000 artists on my iPhone (don't use Match) and have seen my "Other" portion of the Capacity Bar increase by over 1GB since the transition to iOS 7. I don't want these images on my iPhone.

I recently had my phone swapped at the Genius Bar, and after restoring from an iCloud backup about one third of the artist images wouldn't show up. I tried deleting all my music and re-syncing, changing all the settings, signing in and out with my apple id, etc. Nothing worked.

Just now, I searched for an artist and selected the artist's name - which brought me to their page which displayed their artist photo. I then checked my phone and all the artist images had appeared. Weird, but it worked.

Can u give us details on how to get back all the artist pictures, it will be great if u can help us out and share how u did it :)

scofe: Out of curiosity, where did you search for the artist? In the Music app itself? From spotlight?

Thanks.

hey mrsnork, I had the same problem about how my artists that were suppose to have artist pictures while all the others had the standard album art. I tried what you suggested about switching Apple ID's and my phone showed the loading indicator in the status bar but none of my artist pictures came back. Any Suggestions?

Jordan_Hawk122: Sometimes they take some time to load. Do you have "Group By Album Artist" turned on? That seems to make a difference.

yes, i do have group by album artist on. i have tried deleting all of my music and resyncing it, nothing seems to work. i am a bit impatient though so i'll re-attempt what you suggested and give it time. i'll have it sit over night and give you feedback tomorrow.

My iPhone was plugged into my computer, and was recognized by iTunes on my Macbook. On my Macbook, I hit the iTunes Store button. I then searched for an artist (Interpol) that I had songs for on my iPhone, clicked their name until I got to the artist page and saw their artist image in the top left corner. I then checked my phone and all the artist images that were blank suddenly appeared. Beats me, but that's what happened.

I've read all this with interest and carried out the various suggestions. But my problem is slightly different (and VERY annoying) I have two albums by a Swedish group called Gemini - a male/female pop duo. Now I always get some picture of some ugly bloke appearing on my phone! As stated above WHY is yet another thing been imposed upon us with the awful iOS7. (By the way I have to replace all my staff mobile s next month and because of ios7 will not be going iphone!)

(there must be other duplicate artists with the completely wrong pictire coming up. Also I am not on match nor do I want to be)

my artist pictures have still yet to appear and my music app has begun to run slow.

If you're brave enough to mess with the file system on the phone, you can use a program like iExplorer to delete the folder iTunes_control. Then restart the phone. It must then be plugged into iTunes, and when it says something like "welcome to iPhone" choose "set up as a new phone." It will not really setup as new, and all your data will be as it was , but the music library will rebuild.

If nothing else works, the only thing I've found that works every time is to restore the OS and setup again as a new phone. That's pretty much a last resort as you will lose a lot of data, like all your text messages. Not sure if this bothers you enough to take that route.

pennypup: I had the same issue with the band Cream. See my response to Robert McQueen above. Apple's database of photos obviously has some errors. You can at least get album art to display instead of the wrong artist photo by adding a space after the artist name in iTunes. The name will still display correctly.

I will try it when I get home. This is a very annoying bug and I would love an update from apple.

Just to be clear though, I will not lose any of my apps, photos, contacts, ect.. correct?