I can't add album artwork anymore

In previous version of iTunes, one could simply right-click paste artwork into the Get Info of a song or group of songs. The recent version of iTunes does not allow this (hopefully it will get put back in a further update).

However, it is still possible to paste, by using the keyboard shortcut for paste, which is CTRL + V and I believe that the paste command on Windows 8 is the same as Windows 7 (that I use). So try that. Alternatively, save a copy of the artwork onto your computer and use the Add Artwork button on the Get Info/Artwork panel and then navigate to the location of the artwork on your computer.

iTunes supports four different ways of associating artwork with media:

1. The Get Album Artwork function retrieves images from the iTunes Store, based on matching Artist and Album values
2. Right-click > Get Info > Artwork tab, click the Add Artwork button, navigate to and select an image file on your computer
3. Right-click > Get Info > Artwork tab, drag and drop an image file from Windows Explorer to the Artwork window in iTunes
4. Right-click > Get Info > Artwork tab, Ctrl-V will copy any image in the Windows clipboard (copied from a graphics application, web browser, etc.). The the fiend points out, prior to iTunes 12 there was an equivalent right-click > Paste option for the same function, but this has been absent from all three 12.x releases so far.

Option 1 stores the artwork images as separate files in iTunes' Album Artwork folder, Options 2-4 embed the artwork images in your media files.

There are also three cases where options 2-4 may fail:

1. The media files are in a format (usually .WAV) that does not support embedded images - convert to AIFF or ALAC (if you want to preserve lossless quality) or to MP3/AAC.
2. Your media files are read only - in Windows Explorer, right click on the files (or on the folder containing them), make sure that the Read only flag is unset, click OK.
3. Windows permissions are preventing updates to your media files - see turingtest2's user tip on Repair security permissions for iTunes for Windows for info on how to resolve this.

Glad you got it sorted out 🙂

You're right that iTunes shouldn't make any changes to the import settings without user intervention. The only case where I've seen this happening has been when some other application is making use of iTunes and modifying settings in the background. Probably worth checking to see whether this happens again ... its always possible that this was one of those strange quirks that just about any piece of software can occasionally suffer from.

I've been wondering how to do this for awhile. Thanks.

-Ethan