A lot of the music in my iTunes library on my Windows PC is missing artwork. I hate it. How can I add CD cover artwork as needed in iTunes for Windows?
iTunes is really good about including artwork when you buy music through the iTunes Store. If you’re ripping music, however, it tries to match things through the Gracenote database (getting release year, genre, etc too) but it often fails. If you’re getting music from friends or (shhh) through a torrent network, well, then who knows what you’ll get with that mp3 music file, if anything!
There are a few hoops you have to jump through (proverbially, at least) but it is possible for you to fix up the artwork being utilized with your iTunes music library. First off, there’s an automated way: File > Library > Get Album Artwork, but it requires you to be signed in to the iTunes Store and, more importantly, requires you to have exactly titled the album on those tracks, so if it’s “To Live and Die In L.A. (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)” and you named it “To Live And Die in LA (OST)” you’ll be outta luck. Still, give it a shot if you want and hopefully iTunes will do all the heavy lifting for you!
Didn’t get every track? No worries, we can fix ’em up manually too…
I’ve removed the artwork for The Essential Michael Jackson so I can step through the process. Here’s how that looks in iTunes:
A definite bummer when I want to see Michael’s face while listening to some of his great library of music!
A click on the album and a list of tracks opens up:
Easiest from this point is to select all the tracks (select one, then use Control-A to extend it to every track on the CD or album). Then choose Control-I to pop up the info window on that set of tracks:
Here’s where you would fine tune the artist and album names to match the iTunes Store if you wanted, but hey, it’s your library, so if you prefer “OST” to “original motion picture soundtrack” then don’t change it!
Now click or tap on the “Artwork” tab along the top. It’ll be empty since you’re missing the artwork for this set of tracks.
Time to switch gears for a minute. Jump into your favorite Web browser (I use Microsoft Edge) and pop over to Bing image search. Now type in the name of the album and find a decent size album cover image:
Easiest is to find the image you prefer (notice how many variations there are!) and click once on it. This opens up a larger version of the image and some info about the page it’s extracted from: You might want to check that too for release date, studio, etc.
Got it? Great. Right-click and you can Copy the image directly from the Bing search results page:
Now go back to the iTunes Get Info page where the artwork is missing and… paste it in! I use Control-V to paste, btw.
That’s it. Click or tap on “OK” and it’s all fixed up for that set of tracks!
Note that iTunes might be a bit inconsistent showing the new album cover art until you quit and restart the iTunes program. Just part of the fun, sorry to report: I always restart the program after I’ve fixed up album artwork!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Windows for years, please check out my Windows help area for tons of tutorials!
What I’ve noticed in iTunes on Windows 10 is a lot of difficulty in saving artwork when the tracks are imported as WAV files. I’ve been successful in converting to AAC or other codecs and then saving the artwork.
I am having a difficult time adding missing artwork, I can easily find the missing artwork using Bing and when I find the missing artwork I have been saving it to a folder on my Desktop. When I go to the saved artwork folder I can easily go to the artwork file and double click it into the artwork box, but when I click OK it just goes away with no art files being loaded. I followed all your steps and could not get it to work. I can get all the songs in an album highlighted Blue, but when I try to go to the artwork box the Blue highlighted files turn gray and I can not get the album art to show. What do you think I might be doing wrong or leaving a step out? I have over 1600 album covers and all of them are present on my laptop. It is own my desktop that I have the problem and other problems I am cleaning up all which occurred updating to Windows 10. I have uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes numerous times as outlined by Windows 10. This has been frustrating and I would truly appreciate your thoughts or suggestions. Thank you in advance for your time and effort.
I’m wondering if you have a file permissions problem with the individual mp3 files that comprise that particular music CD. Have you had any success with ANY of the titles in your iTunes library?
I’m having the same problem. Have you figured out anything yet?