This article will focus on the built in album art finder function within iTunes. This method of obtaining album artwork is best suited to iTunes libraries that have all tracks correctly labelled with song names, artist names, album names, etc. If your iTunes library is missing the song details (or has titles like Track 01, Track 02 etc), I would recommend using the automated method which I discussed last week. That’s because iTunes’ built-in album art finder relies on the song information (artist/album name) in order to identify the correct album artwork; without this information to begin with, iTunes will be unable to find your artwork.
Ok, so if all your song and album names are in order, read on.
First, you will need to identify and select those songs that have no album artwork and/or that have the wrong album artwork. It is best to only select the ones that are missing album artwork as iTunes has been known to replace the correct artwork for certain songs with artwork for a different album. If you have a large iTunes library, the best way to do this would be to activate Coverflow mode.
iTunes button to activate Coverflow mode for viewing album artwork
Once in Coverflow mode, scroll through the albums and make a note of each one that’s missing artwork.
Scroll through the album artwork to identify albums with missing artwork
Once you’ve identified all the songs/albums that need album artwork, simply switch back to list view and select them by searching for the album and selecting the tracks.
Search for the songs with missing album artwork in list view
Select the songs with missing album artwork, right click on the selection and click on Get Album Artwork.
Your selection of songs should now have album artwork. To test it, simply play the song and the artwork should display in the album artwork window:
iTunes album artwork window with album art displayed
If no album art is displayed, it means that iTunes was unable to fetch album art for those songs that you selected. This could either mean that iTunes does not have the album art for those songs or that the information for the song (song name, album name, etc) in iTunes is incorrect or missing.
If iTunes is unable to find album artwork for lots of your songs, I would recommend using Rinse to automatically download the artwork. This is generally a more successful method because it identifies album artwork based on the song contents itself rather than the song names and album names. Once Rinse has identified your tracks it will also be able to update the song details to the correct ones. For more on how this works, check out the Rinse page.
Otherwise, if iTunes has been able to find most of your album artwork using the built in album art finder function we discussed above, well done, you’re on a good way to updating your entire iTunes library with album artwork. If you are still left with a few songs that still do not have album artwork, check back here soon for a new article on how to find album artwork images and manually add them to the songs in your iTunes Library.
