A Brief Guide on Using The Album Artwork Function On iTunes

The great thing about the newer iPods and iPhones is the ability to add album artwork to the songs stored in your library and on your device. However, many people find this function difficult to operate, especially if they are new to iTunes. With this step by step guide you will be adding artwork to your iTunes library in no time. There are two ways that this can actually be done.

Manual Method

First, you need to select the song or the album that you wish to add the album artwork to. Once you have done this, you will need to right click on the specific track or tracks. This will bring up a menu that gives you various options for what you want to do next. If you look high up on the menu then you will see a tab saying ‘Get Info’.

This is the first way that you can add artwork, so click here. You will see that there are a lot of different sections that you can add information to such as the title of the track and the artist if you look at the last tab that says ‘Artwork’ you will see that there is a white box in which you can add your album artwork.

In that box you can either copy and paste an image, or you can add an image that you already have stored on your computer. The best bets to find good images are the band’s website, its record label’s website, wikipedia.org or Amazon.com. If you wish to have the album artwork then you can save a picture from Google, or even scan the image.

Here you can see the blank box in which you are going to be adding your album artwork. There are also other tabs that you can edit as well such as the general information, and you can even add the lyrics to your favourite songs.

As you can see, the image has now been added to my file and by simply pressing OK I am able to then save the file with the new artwork so that it is ready to be synced to my device.

Automated Method

The other method of adding album artwork is much simpler, and more efficient. To do this, you need to start again by right clicking on the song or songs that you want to edit.

Once you have done this, you should scroll down to where it says ‘Get Album Artwork’. This will then generate various images from the iTunes store for you to use. You do not have to pay for these images, but you do have to have an iTunes Store account in order to be able to use this function. You can also, in iTunes, go to the Advanced menu and choose “Get Album Artwork.” 

The iTunes status window at the top will start showing a progress bar as it scans your iTunes library for albums and downloads the correct art from iTunes.

As you can see from the image above, the iTunes store has found the correlating artwork to the song that I have chosen to edit, and is automatically processing it so that it can be added to my file. This means that once I sync this song with an iDevice, the artwork will automatically appear.

As you can see, this really is all there is to it when it comes to adding artwork to the files in your iTunes library. Anyone can do it, and you will have your library looking great in no time.

SK( Managing Editor )

Obsessed with tech since the early arrival of A/UX on Apple, Sudz (SK) is responsible for the editorial direction of AppleToolBox. He is based out of Los Angeles, CA.

Sudz specializes in covering all things macOS, having reviewed dozens of OS X and macOS developments over the years.

In a former life, Sudz worked helping Fortune 100 companies with their technology and business transformation aspirations.