[cwell2112]

I've been using iTunes to add album art to my music for quite some time now, as it's quick and easy. Recently, however, I started having an issue with it. Typically when I rip a new CD with iTunes (in Apple Lossless), I'll do a google image search for the album art, save it to a folder on my hard drive, highlight the tracks in iTunes, and drag the file into the album art pane.

In the past, the quality of the image I download would be reflected in the quality of the album art image in iTunes, but recently, iTunes seems to scale the image down, leaving a black border around the art in the album art pane and a poor quality image in Cover Flow.

Here's a screen shot of what I'm talking about:

You can see how the art does not fill the album art pane in the lower left, and you may be able to see how poor the quality of the image is compared to adjacent albums in cover flow. The original .jpg was 600x600, so it should be quite sharp and nice looking, but it looks like it would if I were to select a 200x200 or 300x300 original image.

So, can anyone shed some light on why iTunes suddenly started doing this and how I may be able to fix it?

 

[ricksome]

Try This:
For Windows PCs: Find the album art online or elsewhere and right click the JPG. Then click copy. Go to iTunes and Right click the song (or multiple songs if doing a whole album) and then click Get Info . Go to the Album art box and right click the box. Then click paste. Hit OK and you're done.

This embeds the JPG/GIF into the actual MP3 file.

The above from member SoulSyde
This helped me but I am not sure that we have/had the same problem

 

[ricksome]

The album art box has a slider that lets you adjust the size of the album art

 

[cwell2112]

Aha, I solved it. It seems that when I do the google image search and browse through the thumbnails looking for a high quality one, simply right clicking and saving the thumbnail does not get the full size version. I'm not sure if this is something that changed with google or if in the past I always clicked through to view the full size image before downloading.

I'm glad this was user error and not an inexplicable change in how iTunes handles album art.

Well, thanks anyways.

 

[3602]

From a guy who never uses the iTunes library (I tow tracks into my device manually): it seems that iTunes has a "Get album art" function. Of course it needs an account, but you can make one without a credit card.

 

[cwell2112]

Yeah, I'm aware of the "Get Album Art" feature, but I like to have higher quality images than the ones that provides.

 

[krmathis]

Weird!
I do that all the time (Google search + save/copy picture) and never had any issues. Are you 100% sure you actually have a high quality picture? I suspect you do not.