How to Get Album Artwork for an iPod or iTunes

Posted on February 22nd, 2009 by Marck

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Album art may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you download a song from the Internet or rip a song from a CD. Album art may seem unnecessary, but it does give your iPod screen or iTunes player window an added visual effect. To get the album cover for a particular song or a full album collection, here are some ways to do it.

Getting Album Art

Album art is a small image file (usually a JPEG, PNG, or GIF file) that shows the cover of the album the song came from. Media players like iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player may display the album art on a section of the player. For iPods and other digital music players that have video support, album art also provides a complete musical experience. There are many ways to get album art:

Pre-installed album art. If you purchase songs from the iTunes store, all songs and albums already come with album art.
Image files from the Internet. If you download single songs from a site or have a full album of an artist without album art, you can simply save an image file of the album from an online store that sells music CDs. As long as you use the image for personal use, you won’t be violating copyright laws.
Scanning the album. If you rip albums from CDs, you can use a flatbed scanner or a digital camera to get an image file from the actual album cover.

Installing Album Art

To install album art into your iPod, you will need the latest version of iTunes and an iPod that enables video support. Any iPod except the iPod Shuffle has on-screen support for image and video.

To install album art via iTunes, follow these steps:

Open the Album Art area on iTunes. Album Art can be accessed by clicking the Album Art button (the fourth button from the bottom left, right beside the Repeat Play button) on iTunes.
Select the song (or songs) that you want the cover art to be applied.
From a file manager (like Windows Explorer), drag the image file that will serve as the album art image into the Album Art panel. iTunes will automatically associate the music files with this image.

For iPods with video support, album art is installed automatically when you sync a song with an album cover to the iPod. Make sure not to disconnect the iPod when sync is in progress.

Album art may not mean much, but it gives you a much more engaging experience with music. It may take a while for you to add album art to every song on your digital music collection, but the effort is all worth it if you want the full, complete experience of a good song from old times.