As many of you already know, when you buy songs or albums, they will come with album art already, but what about songs that are shared from friends, ripped from CDs or other sources? How would a person get album artwork for their Itunes collection?
There are actually a lot of ways to add album artwork for Itunes. Some manually and some automatically.
#1: Manually Adding Album Artwork (Not Recommend)
I’ll talk about the manual way of adding album artwork first. Basically you will go out there on the internet, download album artwork for each of your albums/songs and open Itunes and drag the images into the missing album spot. There are a lot of sites that provides album art so I won’t link it here. A simple Google search should pop up a hundred of those sites.
Positive: Free and no software to download
Negative: It’s a pain if you have hundreds or thousands of albums/songs.
#2: iTunes Built-in Album Art Finder Function (Not Recommend)
Did you know that Itunes had a built-in album art finder function? This is the quickest way to find album art automatically if you want to find album artwork for iTunes without having to buy a plug-in or software. The problem with iTunes album artwork function is it won’t find album art for all of your songs. I did a simple test and It only found around 30% album art for my albums/songs. This is because this feature will only work for songs that you have downloaded from iTunes which came with album art before.
If you want to use or test this feature, open up Itunes and click on the “Advanced” menu and scroll down and click on “Get Album Artwork”. Check out the screen shot below if you need help finding this option.
Positive: Free and automatic.
Negative: Only found 30% of album art for my songs during testing. Usually only works for songs that you brought from the iTunes store.
#3: Tuneup Media – Finding Album Artwork Automatically (Recommend)
The finding album artwork feature is just one of many great features of Tuneup media. There will be a full review on tuneup media coming very soon, but for now, I will talk about the album artwork feature of this plug-in.
Tuneup will automatically identify albums that are missing album artwork for iTunes (or Windows Media Player 10+) and will provide you with many album art options to pick from such as the import cover, international release, domestic release, etc.. You can click the save button and your missing album arts will be filled with beautiful and high quality cover arts.
Positive: Automatically and quickly find all album arts of your iTunes or Windows Media Player library. Simple to install plug-in that will work for both Windows and MAC.
Negative: It’s not free, but it’s totally worth the asking price.
If you have some money to spend, I would recommend going with Tuneup Media. As I’ve said before, the album artwork feature is just one of many great features of this plug-in.
