How To Add iTunes Artwork To MP3 ID3 Tags Using iTunes
With iTunes 7, Apple added better support for album artwork. Previously iTunes wouldn’t automatically add artwork if you imported your own tracks. Now with iTunes 7, the program will automatically search the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) for artwork, and if any is available it will add it to your files. The problem is though, iTunes doesn’t add the artwork to the actual ID3 tag within the file that is read when other applications play your mp3s, so the artwork is only visible to iTunes.
I’ve discovered a very quick way of fixing this, which will add the iTunes artwork to your track’s ID3 tag. I prefer using iTunes to add the artwork rather than an external application, as (i) it’s quicker, and (ii) the iTunes artwork is much better quality.
To add album artwork using iTunes do the following:
- Find the album you want to add artwork to
- Select all the tracks in the album you want to add the iTunes artwork to the ID3 tag
- In the bottom left-hand corner click on ’show/hide artwork’
- Right-click on the artwork image that is displayed and select ‘copy’
- Now right-click on the tracks you’ve highlighted and select ‘Get info’
- In the pop-up box that right-click in the artwork field and select ‘paste’
Once you’ve done this iTunes will now add it’s high quality images to the albums ID3 mp3 tags, which will mean that other mp3 players and apps will now be able to display the artwork.
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Comment by Scott on 21 August 2008:
Thanks so much for sharing this! I’ve been so frustrated by trying to export itunes mp3s to other players with artwork, and this solved the problem! Thank you!
Comment by Neal on 2 May 2008:
Thanks for the tip. Just a quick note though. You do not need to play the track to see the artwork. Click on the little Arrow above the AlbumArtwork. This will toggles the artwork between the playing track and the selected track.
Comment by Scootros MacGillicuddy on 25 April 2008:
One thing people should be aware of when doing this is that the iTunes album art is higher quality because each image is around 500KB in size! Considering most songs are only 3-4MB in size, this represents around a 15% increase in file size when you add this image to every song file via ID3 tags. This means fewer songs will fit on your ipod when you add this image to every single song in the album. What I do is obtain a much smaller sized image from Amazon.com to add to my song files. I can usually find decent-quality images at less than a tenth of the size of the iTunes image size.