Do you have a lot of music tracks in your iTunes application? One thing that I could not figure out in the past was how to tag each of your albums in iTunes with proper album art.This is so that when you do a “Cover Flow” in your iPod or iPhone or any idevices, you can see all your albums neatly updated with cover art.Well, if this has been giving you trouble, help is on the way! In this article, let’s take a look at how you can update album cover art on your iDevices.
1. Overview
Here’s an overview of the approach we’ll use to update album cover art into your iDevice. What you do is to scan or download album cover artwork from CDs that you rip into iTunes in a graphics format that iTunes understands (JPG format is a good choice). Next, you then link those graphics to the songs and albums you play on iTunes.
2. Get An Image Of The Cover Art
If you buy songs from the iTunes Music store, there typically will already be an image of the album cover art or a photo of the artist.You can see the artwork in the lower-left corner of the iTunes window by clicking the Show/Hide Artwork button.
Now, if you rip an audio CD into iTunes, you don’t get free artwork like this. So you need to get a scanner to scan the CD cover art and save it in a graphics format that iTunes (and its underlying graphics technology, QuickTime) understands — JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, or Photoshop.
You can also use another technique – simply visit Web pages to scout for suitable art. One of my favorite places? The music store on Amazon.com, of course! Just right-click and save the image on your hard
drive.
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3. Add The Artwork To A Song
Ok, moving right along. To add the scanned or downloaded artwork to a song, select the song in your iTunes library, and drag the artwork’s image file from a folder into the artwork viewing area in the bottom-left corner of the iTunes window.
Now, if you have an entire album of songs into which you want to update the cover art, then select the album in Browse view first (or simply select all the songs in the album in song list view). You then drag your image file into the artwork viewing area.
4. Add Artwork While Editing Songs
I also like to add artwork while editing song information. You can also add the artwork to an album while editing multiple songs at once. Here are the steps to follow:
- In Browse view, select the album in your iTunes library.
- Click the Browse button to switch to Browse view so that an Album column appears on the left side of the iTunes window. Click an album to select it.
The Browse view inside iTunes
- Choose File > Get Info or simply press command-I. The Multiple Song Information dialog appears.
- You’ll then enable the Artwork field by selecting its check box. What happens here is that when you add a check mark to a field, iTunes assumes you want that field changed in all the selected songs. Make sure that no other check box is selected except Artwork.
- The last step is to drag your scanned or downloaded cover art graphics file to the Artwork panel. Click OK to make the change.
5. Removing Cover Art
You can remove the artwork for an entire album by opening the Multiple Song Information dialog (as before, choose File > Get Info after selecting the album), enabling the Artwork field, and then clicking OK. With the Artwork field blank, iTunes will replace the artwork with nothing, effectively deleting the artwork.
And that’s all there is to it! I hope you know have a better idea of how to update album cover art for your iDevice. The next time you’re browsing through the albums in your iPod or any iDevice using Cover Flow mode, you’ll find a distinct pleasure in seeing all the cover art beautifully and neatly displayed. Until next time, happy tinkering with your Apple devices!
