How to delete artwork in iTunes

If you're trying to remove the area on the iPod's display taken up by the artwork, you can't. As you have found, if you do manage to delete the pictures themselves, you're simply left with the generic icon, which is hardly attractive, especially on the Now Playing screen, which has a large artwork display area.

If your concern is the storage space used on the iPod for the artwork, I'm not convinced that you will gain much "space" by deleting those pictures. If storage on your iPod is at a premium (i.e. you have more songs in your Library than you can fit on your iPod), then there is possibly a better solution for managing that, by the use of Smart Playlists to automatically remove and add songs to the iPod (according to rules you set).

As you have found, in your iTunes Library, the best method of displaying the songs in a list and without artwork is to use the View/View As/Songs option.

I haven't tested lately, but I came to the conclusion that the overhead for embedded artwork was about 1-1.5% of the size of the media file. iTunes store associated artwork is even more efficient. Stripping it out isn't worth the effort.

tt2

So I see. 😊

And yes, removing the art just leaves empty placeholders or a generic image rather than collapsing the display to show more tracks.

tt2

Should be able to delete the artwork folder in iTunes media folder. Would also have to make sure that downloading artwork is unchecked in iTunes settings.