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Why is album artwork over 35gb?

I have a lot of music, yes, currently over 70,000 songs and 7,000 artists. This equals about 450gb. But I'm trying to reduce clutter and find more space on my hard drive and was surprised to find iTunes Album Artwork is over 35gb. That seems excessive to me. Can anything be done about it?

Posted on Jan 14, 2016 12:14 AM

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9 replies

Dec 16, 2017 1:02 PM in response to livemeyer

I just deleted a >20GB folder from an SSD, and--puzzlingly for a moment--only 1 to 2 GB was freed. This leads me to suspect that iTunes is using "hard links" here, for some reason... though I can't prove it now, because I've deleted the directory. Anyone else wants to validate this, open Terminal, cd to your Cache folder, and run:

stat -f '%l %i %N' */*/*/*/*.itc

(that's a lower case "ell" as the first format parameter, not upper case "aye"), then look for any results with a number other than "1" in the first column, that means the file has more than one filesystem link to it. The second column has the i-node number of the file, and you could probably find another entry in the output that has the same number (with some awk magic).


What all that mumbo jumbo means is exactly what I observed when I deleted my Cache directory: it looks like it takes up a large amount of space, but in fact it doesn't. Instead the same file is getting counted multiple times when the total is being added up, because the same on-disk bytes are linked to from multiple locations in the directory tree.

Jan 14, 2016 9:54 AM in response to livemeyer

That does seem excessive. Mine is 3.4 gb on a slightly smaller library. If you drill down inside the Album Artwork\Cache you should find a folder with a 16 hexadecimal character name. If there is more than one of these folders that would suggest your library has been rebuilt following a crash at some point and a new artwork cache created. There may also be several parallel sets of folders under Cloud Purchases, Custom, Download, Editorial, Generated, Remote & Store.. It might be possible to work out which of these are active and discard the rest Alternatively if all artwork is embedded in your tags your could delete the entire Album Artwork cache and then let iTunes rebuild it. See CreateFolderArt for a script that can embed any store downloaded art.


tt2

Jan 14, 2016 10:00 AM in response to turingtest2

Thank you, very helpful. Under the Cache folder I have 5 folders (however one is all zeroes, as in folder 0000000000) and they in total account for 8.39GB. It appears the "Download" folder under Album Artwork is 26.7GB. Perhaps I should delete these folders and see what the iTunes engine will do. If it crashes I can put them back, if not then I would expect it to start downloading new album artwork. I fear I have many duplicates which might explain why the folder is so large.

Jan 14, 2016 10:38 AM in response to livemeyer

Unless you have multiple libraries sharing the same media folder only one of these sets of parallel folders is actively being used. Ignoring the one made up of zeros you could probably delete the others without affecting your library in any way. If the Download folder is the largest one then that suggests your library mainly uses store downloaded art rather than embedded art. Embedding art makes it easier to copy tracks to another library or use with non-Apple software and devices. Embedding art adds a little to the size of each track, though because of the way that space is allocated in fixed size clusters it may not actually make that many files use more space.


If you search the Album Artwork folder for all files of the form *.itc2 and put the results in descending date modified order you should be able to see which set of folders was updated last and delete the others.


The cache itself contains a set of nested folders some of which may be empty while the lower levels contain any .itc2 files. If you delete the active folder in the Cache folder then all the stored images for your tracks with embedded art will need to be refreshed. If you delete the active set from the Download folder all your store downloaded artwork will need to be redownloaded.


Correctly tagged duplicates shouldn't cause additional artwork images. Close matches that you know are duplicates, but which iTunes doesn't see that way might, but that isn't enough to account for the size of the cache. See Re: How to remove duplicate songs for further advice on duplicates.


tt2

Jan 14, 2016 10:47 AM in response to turingtest2

Thank you, again some really good ideas. I got to this because I had found one song by an artist in one folder and another in another folder (one folder had "The" at the beginning of the band name and one did not). When I combined the folders by matching the folder names, Windows File Explorer asked me if I wanted to rename a .jpg with a (2) at the end because it was a duplicate. I started thinking that happens a lot when I'm moving music folders around. I thought I'd see if all my music folders were hiding duplicate album art so I asked the folder to show hidden files. The album art .jpg files did not appear. I think they are markers for the art for the folder depending on the folder view. Anyway, I'm off track. That sent me searching out where the album art is kept and found that iTunes Album Art folder to be huge. I will try what you say, stick with the most recent .itc2 files and delete the rest.

Jan 14, 2016 11:12 AM in response to livemeyer

Again you want to keep the entire folder tree below the active branches and discard the others rather than actively searching for individual files. here is what I see if I expand each of the subfolders inside Album Artwork


User uploaded file


I assume you're seeing multiple folders in each of Cache, Cloud Purchases, Download, and Generated. If you only have one in Generated that might be a clue as to which of the others to throw away. Otherwise searching for .itc2 files in date modified and looking at the parent folder of the most recently added file will show which hexadecimal value is being used for the active library, so you can discard the others. If I also saw a set of say DDE4261F31982BA7 folders but CCF046191585EA85 has my most recent thumbnail then I would delete each of the DDE4261F31982BA7 folders.


iTunes isn't responsible for any artwork in the album folders. That will most likely have been Windows Media Player in the past. See CleanDeadArt for a script that can tidy up when iTunes reorganization of your media files has left artwork in empty folders.


tt2

Jan 14, 2016 11:47 AM in response to turingtest2

I just went to the cache folder under itunes.albumartwork and searched for *.itc2 files. Just today files were created at 5am while I was sleeping and the computer was hibernating with the lid closed. I don't know how this could happen, but anyway I found at least 24 or more files created. The folders contained over 27,000 itc2 files, and I deleted all that were older than a few days. Actually, it's still deleting as I write this, there are a lot of files.


I also started deleting the itc2 files in the Download folder, but that's a huge process, there are over 200,000 itc files in there. Many dates have 50 or more itc2 files.

Jan 14, 2016 11:53 AM in response to turingtest2

FYI I don't actually have any .jpg album art in these folders, it's all .itc2 files, meaning windows media and other media players have not searched out and downloaded the album art.


Also, I keep my music folder and file names highly organized, I make extra effort to make certain files are named in a certain way and have all the right metadata so they show up correctly in iTunes. Because of this I quite often tell iTunes to search out files in my Music folder, which may explain why it has numerous .itc2 files, considering every time I tell it to do this it starts the process of finding artwork immediately after.

Jan 14, 2016 1:10 PM in response to livemeyer

livemeyer wrote:


FYI I don't actually have any .jpg album art in these folders, it's all .itc2 files.

That is as expected.


I got to this because I had found one song by an artist in one folder and another in another folder (one folder had "The" at the beginning of the band name and one did not). When I combined the folders by matching the folder names, Windows File Explorer asked me if I wanted to rename a .jpg with a (2) at the end because it was a duplicate.


That is why I mentioned .jpg files in your media folders.


I keep my music folder and file names highly organized, I make extra effort to make certain files are named in a certain way and have all the right metadata so they show up correctly in iTunes. Because of this I quite often tell iTunes to search out files in my Music folder, which may explain why it has numerous .itc2 files, considering every time I tell it to do this it starts the process of finding artwork immediately after.


If you don't clear out broken entries after moving things around that might be why you have more .itc2 files than would be expected in the active folders (but I'm not convinced that you do/did, at least as far as the active set of cache files is concerned). I have 20,853 .itc2 files for my library of 73,683 items over all types of media, 65,698 of which are music (6,154 albums, 2,560 artists).


Generally managing metadata in iTunes and letting it manage where the files actually live cuts down the amount of energy spent on managing the library. That said I have developed my own script for consolidating & organizing my media (and any folder art) which uses different character replacements and longer file & folder names than iTunes will generate. (A variant of ConsolidateByMoving.) I don't advocate this level of obsessiveness for anyone else, particularly if you only use one form of software or another to actually play content since these generally make use of the metadata. The physical layout really doesn't matter.


tt2

Why is album artwork over 35gb?

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