TV Show Art / Thumbnails Missing On IOS 8

how to make artwork appear on tv shows/programmes on iPhone

make a copy of the image you want to use and save it on desktop

open image in Preview

go to tools tab

click adjust size

make sure ‘scale proportionally’ is unchecked

make sure width and height are on pixels

set to 2000X2000

image may be stretched if so try to find another image and repeat

save image

use this image in artwork

hope this helps

Hey, I know it's been a while since you posted, but I finally solved this problem on my own iTunes account. I noticed that all my TV shows were missing their album art except for the square images. So, I decided to explore Google images. What I did was run a google image search on any shows missing an image and looked for perfectly even pixel sizes (ex: 300x300, 500x500, 1200x1200, etc.). The following should work for both TV shows and music. For movies, follow steps 1-7 using the resolution size of 284x405 (explained in the last paragraph below).

1) Search for your image.

2) Click your desired square image in google image search and the black box appears with the image description appears

3) Click the resolution size (300x300, 500x500, etc.) and you should see a bunch of options for that image listed from highest resolution to lowest.

4) Right click to copy image, then go to iTunes to your desired album

5) Click "Get Info..." on your album and then click on "Artwork"

6) Paste (Ctrl+V or Command+V) your image into the artwork, then click "OK"

7) Now try importing your show to the desired Apple device and it should now be showing your new artwork

For movies, I found that the resolution should be sized at 284 x 405 to get the right size to show in your artwork albums. You can choose the highest resolutions possible, then resize them to 284x405 to keep their clarity but shrink the image size. It works great for me! All of my albums have visible artwork and I was even able to create a couple of my own album artwork for home videos and whatnot.

I hope this helps!

I posted this in another support thread, sounds like the same issue.

I was having issues where artwork for videos wasn't showing up in my devices (iPad 3 with iOS 7, iPhone 6S with iOS 8.3). I'm using iTunes 12.1.2.27 on Windows 7.

I closed iTunes, deleted my C:\Users\<my username>\My Music\iTunes\Album Artwork\Cache folder, and restarted iTunes. Most of my videos, which had been showing artwork, now did not show artwork in iTunes. I went through each item, did a "Get Info" (Ctrl-I) and "Ok" (Enter). The artwork appeared in iTunes, like this forced iTunes to re-read the file and add the artwork.

It was a laborious process, perhaps I could have deleted all videos and re-added them, but with the keyboard it was pretty fast (Ctrl-I, Enter, right-arrow, Ctrl-I, Enter, right-arrow...) I don't have that many videos.

After that, I removed the videos from my phone and did a sync and the artwork was back. I haven't checked the iPad yet. Your Mileage May Vary.

Although quite late in the discussion, I have also recently faced this problem of Movie Artwork not showing up in the video app on iPhone as well as iPad.

None of the suggestions worked for me, and after almost half a day of experimenting, came to the following tips for creating artwork and which finally showed up in my videos app on iPhone and iPad.

1. Selected an artwork from the net (any JPG or PNG will do - your choice of picture)

2. In photoshop, or any other imaging app, crop the selected photo/pic to 4:6 Ratio in Portrait mode. (Width should not be more than 4 and height 6)

3. Again using any re-sizing software, scale down larger images than 400:600 pixels to any size SMALLER than 400 pixels width and 600 pixels height. In fact it would be better if a size even smaller than 400:600 could be chosen. Ensure that the aspect ration of 4:6 is maintained while reducing the image size.

4. Go into iTunes, select your device, go to movies and DESELECT the movie. Then Sync the device in order to physically remove the file from the device. Refer to screen shot above)

5. Select Movies in iTunes (second icon in upper left corner of iTunes), and locate the file entry for the movie. Right Click (Ctrl- click) and then select "Get Info" and inside that select the Artwork tab. Replace the artwork if already existing, or add the artwork which you worked on in steps 1 to 3 above and press OK.

6. In iTunes, re-select your device again and go into the Movies section of the device and re-select the movie for syncing. Apply sync.

That has done the trick in all my missing artwork in movies.

Hope this helps all of you till Apple provides a permanent solution to this vexing problem.

Square artwork, resolution did not matter, iOS 8.3, iPad Air.

Thanks - this worked great!

Having the same problem. Resolution and aspect changing did not fix.

Guys... Try this.

No covers are displayed on iOS devices?

Starting at iOS 8 only squared cover art are shown on iOS devices (except AppleTV).

I use an app called "MetaTV" that's available in the appstore. It utilizes SQUARE cover art, and all of my TV episodes when rendered through this meta-data tagging app show up on my iPhone 6+ with coverart, everytime -- as long as you select "square" coverart.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/metatv/id590518045?mt=12

You are not alone. There are about a million other people that have asked the same question. I have an iPhone 5S that is running the new iOS9.1 beta and even it doesn't show album artwork yet unless it is square. It's a mess.

Here's what I've found out. I'm on iOS 9.0.1. If you have a movie "saved" in the cloud and then download it and sync it, its thumbnail will appear in Videos. If you didn't download and sync it, it's not there. Dumbest thing ever.

Crop the original Artwork to a square. right click on the TV show, choose "get info", then the artwork tab. Add the cropped square artwork and click ok. Sync the device with iTunes and your artwork will appear on the device.

Same issue here.

Everything shows fine in itunes on my IMac running El Capitan 10.11.2.

However Ipad air artwork is missing on about 40% of the tv shows and movies. (and all music videos)

The artwork is replaced by the dreaded gray rectangle or a screen shot on music videos. (the videos still play fine)

About 2/3 were purchased from itunes so this is a bug that affects ITunes purchases as well as converted files.

Now, here's the latest, last night while watching my brand new Apple TV, I spotted some missing art work there too! grrrrr

This started after the newest update.

One warning to potential new Apple TV purchasers...The Siri function can not search your itunes library!

So while Siri has tremendous potential for TV viewing, and I do love the functions that work, at present it only searches the ITunes store or pay services.

I hope a lot of people call Apple Care about this artwork issue, because lately I've seen Apple delete features and functions and after several IOS updates, no fix or re-instalment of the functions occur. Apple's "Pages" comes to mind after the big IOS push. Lots of neat new capabilities, but core

functionality has been decimated and despite claims that some functions will return, I have seen no evidence of that occurring in the near future (or ever).

I'm pleased to report that I have a fix for this. I don't believe it's a bug so much as Apple trying to favour purchased vs home-ripped TV shows.

The answer is to format the jpg image artwork for TV shows to 640x640. This the native resolution for all purchased TV shows on iTunes store - unlike movies.

It's a stupid issue but that's my only fix - once done then image shows up in the both the preview of all your TV shows and also alongside episodes on your iOS device.

You can do this with basic image software or even use preview:

Open your image in preview -> Tools -> Adjust size -> Untick "scale proportionally" -> key in width and height as 640.

It's obviously a squashed image but if you can crop from the original you can take your pic.

Beggars can't be choosers after all.

Let me know if this works for you.

[For ref I'm on latest iTunes 12.2 and iOS 9.3 (latest as at May 2015) - I'm sure this is not a software/hardware issue but rather how Apple intends it to work, annoying as it is]

Mint!! Nicely done sir. This worked perfectly for me because the .mp4 movies I have didn't show the artwork I attached whiled tagged as "Home Movies" and now that I switched them all to "Movies" in iTunes using Get Info then resynced my iPad, all the artwork is now attached in Movies. Now my 3 yr old daughter can pick her movies using the images cause she can't read. Not to mention they are all right next to the purchased iTunes movies. This worked out even better than I had wanted it originally. Thank You!