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Ever since the advent of the iPhone and iPod touch—with their gorgeous displays system wide, and especially while playing music—album artwork has become more and more important to me. I mean, face it, seeing the artwork of the song you’re listening to is a lot nicer than staring at a large, white/gray musical note in the place where a nice image should be. When it comes to getting this artwork, there are a few ways to go about it. Many of them take some time, but they are completely worth it. Of course, if you purchase any music through the iTunes Store, it will already have the artwork which is nice. As such, this post is more for the songs you get from your huge CD collection, etc.

The first way to attempt to get the artwork is to right click the song in iTunes and then choosing “Get Album Artwork.” However, I’ve found this don’t work very well. Also, this method requires sending the song information to Apple, which some people may not be comfortable with. A better way, in my opinion, is to go through Amazon or other websites with high quality album art images (at least 500X500 pixels in my experiences works best).

When you find a song or album in the Amazon MP3 store, the artwork is prominently displayed in the upper left of the web page. Furthermore, this artwork is the appropriate size (usually around 500x500) to show up nice and clear on the large iPhone screen. Simply choose to see the larger version and drag that image to your desktop.

However, what may be even easier than that is Album Art Exchange. This site’s sole purpose is simply to share high quality album art for your music. It’s user-driven, so you can upload content yourself if it’s not already in there, and users can rate the quality of the scan so you know you’re getting a faithful representation…something you don’t always get at Amazon.

No matter where you get the artwork, the next step is to drag it into iTunes. First, though, you will need to hit the square with a triangle inside in the lower left of the iTunes interface to see a box displaying either the artwork or a message to drag your own artwork there. This is obviously where drag the file you previously found.

To quickly add artwork to every song in an album, select all of the songs in iTunes using shift+click, the select “Get Info” from the File menu (or hit command+I). This will pull up the Multiple Item Information window, the bottom right of which has a box for Artwork. Simply drag your image into this box and it’ll be applied to every song you highlighted with shift+click.

The methods above will give you certain results, but they’re not automatic. Therefore, it can be extremely time consuming depending on the amount of missing artwork you have. Another way to go about this is to download an application such as TuneUP, GimmeSomeTune, or TidySongs (none of which I have used). These applications are able to analyze your music and get the data and album artwork for them in one swoop according to their feature list. Although they have the possibility of retrieving incorrect data (and cost money), I’m sure these programs are pretty quick although the apps usually cost money.

Do you have different methods or other programs to recommend? Let us know in the comments below.

Products [TuneUP, GimmeSomeTune, or TidySongs]
See [Album Art Exchange]