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How do I add artwork to videos in Apple iTunes?

I've been adding videos to my Apple iTunes library, but almost all of them end up with a black box as the visual image, which is less fun than box covers, like my albums have. How do I add artwork to my video files?


Dave's Answer:

It turns out that getting to the spot in iTunes where you can add the artwork / cover graphic isn't as easy as it could be, and then, as you'll see, there's another complication when you want to actually find artwork.

Let's start where we always start, however. At the beginning.

Here's what you are doubtless seeing on your computer:

Apple iTunes: No cover art on a video The Matrix

Not good, not good at all.

To solve this, you'll want to hold down the Control key on your keyboard while clicking on the name of the video that you're trying to fix. You'll see:

Apple iTunes: Get Info pop-up contextual menu

Choose "Get Info" as you can see I'm doing here, and now you'll get the Get Info window, in which you want to click on the "Artwork" tab. It's not very exciting:

Apple iTunes: No cover art on a video The Matrix

That's what we want, though. Now leave that window open and switch to a Web browser because it's time to go hunting, hunting for cover art.

I almost always just pop over to Amazon.com for art, but in rare occasions Amazon fails to have what I seek, and then Google Images helps out.

This time, I'm in luck, as Amazon does indeed have artwork of the cover box from the film The Matrix, as you can see in this snippet here:

Amazon.com: Cover art for the DVD movie The Matrix

Move your windows around so that you can see the Get Info window from iTunes while simultaneously viewing the page in your Web browser that has the artwork you want.

Once you've done that, simply drag the graphic off the browser page and into the big white box in the Get Info window. It'll look like this:

Apple iTunes: Dragging cover artwork for The Matrix

Once you let go of the mouse the graphic "settles" into the image box nicely:

Apple iTunes: Adding Artwork for DVD movie film The Matrix

Looks good. Click on "OK".

Now, finally, your video in iTunes has nice cover art:

Apple iTunes: cover artwork for the DVD video The Matrix

And now you know exactly how to do it too!



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Comments

Cool. Thanks. What I do to add cover art is to start the video playing, then pause it and take a snapshot with command-shift-4 and selecting the area I want. Drag the resulting file to the artwork window and click OK.

Posted by: Partners in Grime at August 10, 2008 11:37 AM


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